


An Unstoppable Force

by giandujakiss, iteration



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: AU after 2x15-ish, Abandonment Issues, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Espionage, F/M, Finch's superhero-like ability to evade tails, Irrelevant Gift Exchange, LOOMING FEELINGS, M/M, Original Character - Freeform, Reese doesn't know what to do with people who aren't trying to manipulate him, emotionally stunted behaviour, high-functioning idiots, inconstant levels of self-awareness, intelligence gathered by means of interpersonal contact, made-up CIA protocol, requited everything, third season what third season, tweed lust, when subplots take over
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-07-15
Packaged: 2018-01-07 10:02:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1118566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/giandujakiss/pseuds/giandujakiss, https://archiveofourown.org/users/iteration/pseuds/iteration
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is still trying to figure out this little mouse of a woman who’s hired him, who can do anything with computers and has more money than God and who can barely walk and yet somehow always manages to evade him, who won’t tell him anything about herself but who says she knows everything about him – and he knows that can’t be true, it can’t –</p><p>When he realizes, she’s actually attracted to him. </p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shadowolfhunter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowolfhunter/gifts).



> Written from [giandujakiss's idea](http://giandujakiss.tumblr.com/post/68472060620/goddammit) and notes.
> 
> Thanks to [marginaliana](archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana) for beta.
> 
> Thanks to [enemyofperfect](archiveofourown.org/users/enemyofperfect) for handholding through some weapons-grade writer's block.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic comes with [a fanmix](http://8tracks.com/the-emef/an-unstoppable-force).

Sometimes, when John Reese wants a laugh, he reads the wikipedia entries about espionage.

> Human Intelligence (frequently abbreviated HUMINT) is intelligence gathered by means of interpersonal contact, as opposed to the more technical intelligence gathering disciplines such as Signals Intelligence, Imagery Intelligence and MASINT. NATO defines HUMINT as "a category of intelligence derived from information collected and provided by human sources." Typical HUMINT activities consist of interrogations and conversations with persons having access to information.
> 
> The manner in which HUMINT operations are conducted is dictated by both official protocol and the nature of the source of the information. Within the context of the U.S. military, most HUMINT activity does not involve clandestine activities.

_Does not involve clandestine activities._ That’s hilarious. Next thing you know, the CIA will be telling the public that their agents have strong boundaries between themselves and their work. This crap is so fictional, it’s practically James Bond. (And at least Bond was an appealing fiction. This is just boring.)

Though the fact is, it’s easy for the CIA to pretend that agents never have to do things like sleep with their marks in order to gather information, because in practice, it doesn’t actually come up all that often. Agents use civilian covers, and if they find themselves in sexual situations, it's usually just to maintain those covers.

> No intelligence collection discipline is more likely to find meaning in apparently small bits of information than is HUMINT.

John never had to maintain a cover with Finch - he never had a cover. He just wanted intel. He _needed_ intel. He needed intel like he needed _air_. And John used every technique he knew. It got him… nowhere. Harriet Finch was a timid, quiet, self-effacing woman. She wore thick tweed like a character from an Agatha Christie novel. To say she “knew her way around computers” was an understatement of monumental proportions. She had, to put it politely, been responsible for the discovery of an enviable number of networking vulnerabilities. She’d probably written the TCP/IP spec herself and given it to DARPA. As far as John could tell, she was the original hacker. And she had unlimited funds, like a reclusive billionaire from a comic book. Except one who… kind of looked like a librarian. A librarian who was impervious to surveillance.

> "Witting" is a term of intelligence art that indicates that one is not only aware of a fact or piece of information, but also aware of its connection to intelligence activities.
> 
> Information sources may be neutral, friendly, or hostile, and may or may not be witting of their involvement in the collection of information.

_Information sources may be neutral, friendly, or hostile, and may or may not be witting of their involvement in the collection of information._ Oh, Finch was witting of her involvement, that was for certain. She knew, and she understood. She was just really underestimating his distrust of people.


	2. Intelligence Gathering Fiasco

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harriet Finch claims to know everything about John Reese.
> 
> John Reese knows nothing about Harriet Finch.
> 
> Their coping mechanisms are not compatible.

New York City  
October, 2011

Harriet Finch commands a lot of attention. She is small, wears thick glasses, and her hair is always pulled back, in a reliably identical way, with a tortoise shell comb. But she commands a lot of attention. She could teach a course on withering gazes.

“Mr. Reese, in the course of your employment at the CIA, did you often have targets who evaded your surveillance?”

She has very limited spinal movement, and sometimes seems like she can barely walk. Yet, while John has never offered her assistance, he feels certain she would scornfully reject his help. She, however, recurrently assists him - with money, equipment, information, or (often, it seems) with first aid.

“Yeah, marks got away sometimes,” he answers, while trying not to move. Finch is cleaning a small abrasion - a scratch, really - on the back of John’s head.

“And tell me,” she asks. “Did any of them _ever_ disclose the information you wanted… just because you went up to them and _asked politely_?” She says, while smoothing down the tiny, inconspicuous bandage she’s applied over the wound.

John doesn’t answer immediately, but he doesn’t get up from his chair either, and Finch moves around it to gaze down at him, over the rims of her glasses. “Well?” she says. She somehow seems to be rolling her eyes, though she isn’t moving at all.

John’s mouth quirks. He’s been tailing Finch every night for weeks, and it’s gotten him nowhere. Why _not_ go ahead and ask? “Come on, Finch, tell me: where do you live?”

She sighs. “We have a new number, Mr. Reese.”

*

It’s been a month, and John is still trying to figure out the person who hired him. This woman who won't tell him anything about herself. This person who can do anything with computers, has mysterious wealth, and an unlikely ability to hide any and all personal information. John doesn’t even know her real name, but she says she knows everything about him – and he knows that can’t be true, it can’t –

John's eyes flutter shut. He keeps forgetting to get some rest, and sleep deprivation makes him worry about things he's not yet in a position to fix. His head is going around in circles, he’s letting his failure to find Finch’s residence bother him when there's no point, there's no point...

“Can you move your fingers and toes?”

He’s injured. Right. That’s why he’s sitting here. "It's just a graze, Finch."

There’s no point in telling her, though. Trying to be a tough guy with Finch is like putting up a big sign that says “treat me like an invalid.” She already has the bigger of the two first aid kits open, and is pretending not to hear his protests. “Off, Mr. Reese,” she says, pulling at his shirt.

And John complies, but he rambles about the case the whole time she bandages his arm. He doesn’t want to think about how lucky he was, _again_ , with this superficial injury. And he doesn’t want to think about how much pushups and bicep curls are going to hurt. For weeks. He just looks up at the ceiling and counts the chain links on the light fixture.

“You know, Finch, she shot him because he wouldn’t give her his wifi password.” Finch lets him ramble, but she never so much as cracks a smile. “But it turned out he didn't want to give it to her because he'd lost it, and was too embarrassed to say so.”

She doesn’t even seem to hear him. "Lean forward, Mr. Reese."

John leans forward, and Finch presses down into his shoulder. Her hands are warm. John can tell, from the way it feels, that it really is just a graze.

"Ow,” he complains. He’s always at his most childish when he has minor injuries.

“Shush, Mr. Reese. I know you only make owie noises when it doesn't actually hurt.”

In addition to being a wealthy, secretive hacker, Harriet Finch is psychic. _Owie_ noises, Finch?"

"Yes." She smoothes her hand over the bandage. “We're done here.”

So John starts pulling his shirt back on. But that’s when it happens. That’s when he sees it: Finch glancing towards him - towards his shirt still hanging open - and then looking away, flushed.

Later, John realizes he’d never even considered Finch's libido. Something about her - something about the flat shoes, the thick glasses, the layers of tailored wool - had just removed Finch's sexual appetite from the equation, right from the start. _What an oversight_. It seems so obvious, now: the way Finch's gaze never lingers too long on his face, and the way she sometimes stammers, ever so slightly, when he smiles.

"Hey, Finch, have you seen -" John doesn’t finish the question; he just approaches the desk where Finch is checking the first aid supplies. He pretends to look all over the desk for his earpiece. Harriet tenses as he moves close to her, and John moves even closer, his uninjured arm brushing up against hers. He hears her breath catch

"Your earpiece is in your front left pocket, Mr. Reese,” she says, staring at the desk.

"Oh," John says, watching a flush creeping up over she neckline of Finch’s blouse. “Right.”

All this time, John thinks, he was sure that she didn’t laugh at his jokes because she didn’t like him, or just didn’t like people in general. He was sure that her physical reticence was the "reclusive" part of "reclusive billionaire." But this. This changes everything.

Kara and Mark taught him all about this game. He never played as well as they did, but then, no one played people as well as they did. They taught him well, though. John learned how to use seduction in intelligence operations from the best. He learned to use his body as a tool, to think of his mark as a puzzle, and he learned that agents had no use for guilt. Or shame, for that matter.

"See you tomorrow, Finch."

He walks home, breathing in the night air, looking up at the sky like it holds promise and potential. He is triumphant. For months, Harriet’s kept him off-balance and running in circles. She's shown him, daily, how much she knows about him, even as she's kept him in the dark without ever saying why. But now he’s got something on her, he’s got a weapon, and he’s – he’s exultant, this is perfect, this is something he can use.  He isn’t attracted to her – it has never really occurred to him, to be honest - but that hardly matters. John can’t stop smiling.

*

So he waits for the right moment, and it comes a couple of weeks later. He's taken a beer bottle to the head and the cut on his forehead is oozing dark, red-black blood into his eye. The number, a bartender named Mark (totally wrong name for a bartender, thinks John; they should all be called Joe, Ralph… maybe Ed) had been targeted by a real-estate developer who wanted his property. John had sorted it all out, but -

"Hey, Finch, at least I didn't get shot, this time."

John can barely feel the cut, really. It's nothing he couldn't handle on his own. But something about Finch's face, when she sees him walk in, tells him it’s time to sit on her desk and let her stand between his thighs, and it’s time to let her cluck disapprovingly as she cleans the wound with gauze. He wants to start rambling about all the times he's been hit over the head with bottles before, but he doesn't - he keeps quiet on purpose. He keeps still as she tapes a butterfly bandage over his eyebrow, and listens as she mutters about him needing to be more careful. He is docile. The library falls quiet.

And just when she’s about to pull away, he catches her arm and reels her in, his free hand coming up to cup the side of her face.  “Thanks, Harriet,” he says, and gently covers her mouth with his own. She tastes like the pink frosting on the donuts he’d brought this morning. 

And he feels her lips form a little “oh” of surprise, and he is hesitating - would Finch prefer a compliant man, or a forceful one? John doesn’t know - when she kisses him back. It's just a slight little caress of her mouth, but John feels a sudden rush, and he stands, pulling her into the warm space between them.

"Oh," she says. And John thinks: this won't be a problem at all.

Except then, she’s pushing him away. She's turning her head - his lips catch the pearl stud of her earring - and her hands are pressed against his chest. Her voice is low and rough as she says: “this – this isn’t part of your job description, Mr. Reese.” She isn't looking at him.

And he smiles at that. “Consider it a perk,” he murmurs, leaning back in.  “I do love my work.”

But she pulls away from him. She doesn't look at him; she just walks unevenly to the glass board, and starts taking down the photographs of Mark the misnamed bartender and his would-be assassins. Down they come, one by one. The wife, the brother, the customer with the weird purple hair. Finch removes them.

“I think it’s best if we keep things professional, Mr. Reese,” she says, inflectionless.

John doesn't - he can't - he just stands there for a minute. Stunned. This isn’t happening. It’s just - he knows what he saw. This isn’t him failing to notice that Rebecca Gunderson didn’t really want him to ask her to the 10th grade formal. This is - this isn’t _personal_ , it is John Reese’s _professional opinion_ that Finch is attracted to him. He doesn't even know what to… He wasn’t wrong, _he knows what he saw_ , what he -

“You want this,” he says. “You want me.” He knows it's true, but here he stands, waiting for her to deny it, to lie to him.

She stills. “Yes,” she agrees.

And John's world flips over, while Harriet just pulls down another picture. It's a scruffy dog who belonged to the bartender. He'd died, jumping in front of his owner and catching a bullet meant for him. John has to tug his eyes away from the photograph, bring himself back into the moment. He feels dizzy.

“Then why –”

She turns back towards him then; blinks at him like he’s a slow child. John notices, distantly, how expressive her eyes are. “Mr. Reese, I am your employer.”

John barks out a laugh, but it is a caustic, bitter sound. John doesn't - he can’t - what is happening? “I’m not going to _report_ you, Harriet.”

He waits for her to answer, but she says nothing. She just look at him blankly. She is nothing like Kara. Not even a little bit. She might be the exact opposite.

“What is this?” John starts to pace, angry and restless. “What is this about? Do you –” but then he stops. Something's just occurred to him.

“Are you trying to _protect_ me?” John doesn't wait for an answer. “You are, aren't you?” he says, his voice utterly flat. "You – you’re trying to protect me. From you.”

*

It’s just so ludicrous. The idea of it… is ludicrous. John’s mind goes to Kara, to her face, to the face she would make if she was here, if she saw. Kara would probably hate Finch. She would hate Finch and she would laugh if she saw this. _What, John, is this drab little woman _protecting_ you?_ she would jeer. _Are you a damsel in distress, now, John? Is she your knight?_

“Are you joking?” John asks Harriet. “I don’t need your protection, Finch.”

But she doesn’t answer. She just stands there, watching him, her expression unreadable. Everything in the room - the stack of books, the monitors, the dust motes - seem incredibly real to John, as though this was the setting for an operation, and he is reflexively cataloging them. He is - John is in Kosovo, trying to talk himself out of a room with 14 Kalashnikovs pointed at his head. He is in a missile silo with Kara, trying to avoid her finding out about Jessica. He is in China, and she just shot him -

“People don’t protect me,” he says, slowly, because he’s confused about having to explain this. “Do you think there’s anything, anything at all, you could do to me that hasn’t already been done?”  And he is becoming angry; he feels it rising up in his chest.

“Anything that - that _I_ haven’t done?”

Her impassivity is intolerable; suddenly, he wants to throw things. He finds himself confused that she isn’t backing away. She said she knew everything about him – she should know what’s standing in front of her. What he is capable of. If she really understood, if she had any idea, she would never….

“Should I tell you the things I’ve done?  You said you knew, Harriet, but do you really know?  Was your Machine watching when they sent me to Serbia?  I didn’t see any cameras – should I tell you how many terminations I did?  They didn’t want me to use a gun; I slit their throats instead; it was supposed to look like street attacks –”

And then he’s telling things he shouldn’t be telling, things he was trained not to tell, because assassinations are always classified, and it doesn’t matter that he’s in hiding now, that he does illegal things every day now, it still goes against the grain to spill classified data. But she has to know, she has to understand, she has to. John does not need protecting. _Other people_ need to be protected _from John_ , because nothing _stopped_ him, nothing... That banker on Mykonos – John had kept him alive for days, even Kara was impressed by that one – the housemaid in Budapest, Anna, she’d thought John had loved her – the waiter in Damascus, Kara insisted he was a courier for al Qaeda, but even after weeks he just kept screaming his innocence – that diplomat’s son, he hadn’t done anything, but Mark said they needed to send a message to his mother –

And distantly, John realizes he needs to stop talking, he needs to stop talking, because Harriet couldn’t have known about these things. She couldn’t have known what he is, she would never have hired him if she’d known, she would never have gotten within fifty feet of John without, without an _army_ of bodyguards, and if he keeps talking she’ll know, she’ll know and she’ll take this job away.  He’ll come in tomorrow morning and she’ll be gone, the library will be empty and there will be no more numbers, and the thought of that makes him want to get down on his knees and _beg_ , swear to _anything_ , do anything she wanted, anything she asked…

He trails off.  He has no idea how long he’s been talking, but his throat is sore, and his eyes sting. Harriet is still standing there, unmoving. Her leg must be aching by now.

Silence falls over the library. A prolonged, suffocating silence. Harriet is just looking at him.

John sits, heavily.  He knows what he’s done.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Reese,” she says, and this is it – she’s going to tell him it’s over, he’s fired, she’s going to find someone else - and John _hates_ himself for messing up like this, he wants to _abase_ himself, maybe she’ll pity him, give him another chance, and he prepares to go to his knees –

“I’m sorry, Mr. Reese.” she says. “You can’t dictate who I choose to protect.  Or - how I choose to protect them.”

She turns off the monitors and gathers up her coat. John stares, unable to process her words. He can’t even make himself stand up.

“It’s been a long day, Mr. Reese.  You should go home and get some rest.”  She makes her way toward the stairs. “I’ll call you when we have another number.”


	3. Dramatis Personae

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harriet Finch (real name unknown) works in an abandoned library, uses dozens of aliases, and used to be engaged to man called Gray Hendricks. She wears clothes that are unnoticeable unless you know a lot about tailoring. Her presence is unassuming unless she looks directly at you. She displays multiple signs of attraction to John, but when John kissed her, she pushed him away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [marginaliana](http://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana) for beta.
> 
> Thanks to [enemyofperfect](http://archiveofourown.org/users/enemyofperfect) for everything.

John Reese

After serving in the U.S. army, John Reese (real name unknown) spent 15 years in the CIA, as a field agent. 15 years of his life in a 20,000-employee, government funded, multiple-directorate intelligence agency. 15 years in which he acted on the intelligence analysis of dozens of people he'd never met, under the orders of people who got their orders from other people who had gotten _their_ orders from who knows what higher-up level of clearance. He'd relied on the wisdom of faceless executives and done what his handlers had wanted. Up until they'd wanted him to kill his partner. Up until they'd wanted his partner to kill him.

Now, John Reese works for one person. And he gets his intelligence from one machine. He knows what he is doing, and who he is doing it for. He isn’t always sure _why_ he’s doing it, but he knows that when he helps people, he can see those people and speak to them, and know that he has not been lied to by his boss. His boss, whom John sees every day. Their lives are intertwined, linked in a way that could be claustrophobic, but isn’t. Harriet has given him a purpose, has given his days structure and meaning, and given him a home, but John has never felt that he was… kept. They just - they just work well. They fit.

But somehow it isn’t enough. John can now look his boss in the eye, and he can ask her anything about their work, and she will tell him what she knows. But about everything else, she is uncommunicative. And John just can’t stand it

And that is why John kissed her. He doesn’t really know how it happened. What chain of events led him to see Harriet Finch’s private life as an intelligence-gathering problem? And when did ‘intelligence-gathering problem’ turn into ‘desperate need to know’? He doesn’t know how it happened. And then, having failed to learn _anything_ new, he somehow found himself spilling his guts to her. Telling her every horrible thing he'd ever done. Things she couldn't possibly have known. Some of them were the kind of thing he might have said anyway, little truths used to get truths in return. But not like that. Not the way he'd just cut himself open.

John spends the next twelve hours in a haze. He leaves the library, and starts walking. He wanders - hands in his pockets, head both empty and overfull at once - through New York City. All night long.

And in the morning, he finds himself back at his motel, and Harriet is standing in front of his door.

“Mr Reese,” she says. “We have a new number.”

And they don’t discuss it. Just like that, the incident is over. John goes back to work. He doesn’t bring it up, and Harriet just works on the case, same as she always has.

It turns out to be a really difficult case. A strange case of corporate espionage and professional jealousy, with some assassins mixed in. John works on it for three days. He barely has time to eat, never mind sleep, and nearly ends up becoming one of the perpetrator’s victims. But on the fourth day, arrests are made, and Harriet drags a horribly incapacitated John back to the library. John - scared, out of his mind a little bit - has been dosed with some kind of tranquilizer. He doesn’t needed a surgeon, though, so Harriet takes him back, patches him up, and watches over him while he sobers.

It’s only later, in a scorchingly hot shower, that John remembers Harriet carrying him into the library and taking care of him. And he thinks: perhaps she has just decided to utterly disregard the awkwardness. Pretend it never happened. John thinks: he could... he _should_ have lost everything. Somehow, he does not know how, he hasn't. But one thing is certain: now, he will never know who Harriet Finch really is.

***

Two years later.

The Doppelgänger

"...so when the choir started singing, that covered up the sound of them getting in. That's how they got by unnoticed, even though they had to break the locks."

"A choir. Hm," Harriet says, as she wraps the fingers on John's right hand.

It's not a big scratch, but Finch insists on treating skin abrasions, however small. They agreed long ago that it’s best to just let Finch do first aid on John, because it’s easier for her to make dressings nearly invisible. If only because she can use both hands, and doesn’t need a mirror.

"On a side note, Finch, I was wondering if your Machine could erase everything Andrew Lloyd Webber's ever done from the world's hard drives."

Harriet very nearly looks like she’s thinking of laughing. But instead, she turns towards one of the monitors. "So the choir explains the time frame. This would appear to have been a delib -"

Suddenly, Harriet stops speaking, and stares at the monitor. She blinks, as though to check whether her eyes deceive her. Then she opens and closes her mouth.

"John," she says, frowning.

John raises an eyebrow.

"You've - this says that you've just been arrested by the NYPD, and are currently being held at the 18th precinct."

John just… waits for Harriet to elaborate. But she only continues to stare at her monitor. “Okay. And what... did I do?"

"You've killed someone by the name of... Benjamin Geoffrey Daniels. 16 years old. And you've injured half a dozen others."

John is instantly on his feet. This is - he doesn’t have a contingency plan for this kind of identity theft, but he’ll have time to improvise one on the way. He picks up his sidearm, and is already halfway to the door when Harriet says -

"Mr Reese!"

“…Finch?”

"I believe I might…” She gestures at her monitor. “When you and I met, Mr Reese, I bailed you out of an NYPD precinct just like that one, as I'm sure you recall. I had been following you for some time, and had been waiting for the right moment to approach you. I had been waiting for a moment when you would be in a... position to negotiate, let's say."

“Yes, yes, you waited for me to be arrested, Finch, now _get to the point_.”

Harriet looks steadily at John, and then gestures for him to move closer, and take a look at the monitor. "I'm reminding you of this, because... You see, to approach you when you were arrested, I had to _know_ you'd been arrested. So I wrote a script which collated, processed, and analyzed NYPD information, and let me know if and when they had someone matching your specific description."

Now it’s Reese's turn to stare at the monitor. "What's going on, Finch?”

"Well I suppose I…” She hesitates, and John realizes he’s never seen Harriet in a state of bewilderment. She’s a completely different person. “This isn't The Machine, Mr Reese, this is just a script... I can’t tell you why or how it has been run. But it… just had…” She took a deep breath, and suddenly becomes Harriet again. "Mr Reese, someone who exactly matches your description has been arrested and charged with manslaughter. There may or may not be a case of identity theft. I can only tell you that he is currently being held as John Doe, has a physical description identical to yours, has all the characteristics of a former field agent, and has definitely killed someone in a subway train,"

Before she even finishes saying "There may or may not be a case of identity theft,” John has gone back to his weapons cabinet. Harriet continues speaking a mile a minute, as John changed into a bulletproof vest. “…and the Machine hasn't sent us his number, Mr Reese, but I believe we should investigate." 

_I believe we should investigate._

John is putting his earpiece in as Harriet says it, and hears the words as though spoken by two Harriets at once. He doesn't even look in her direction - she knows what he's going to do - and punches a code in the keypad near the door. He grabs two of the envelopes of spare cash, and is out the door in under eight seconds.

“I’m looking into why the script is running, Mr Reese, but I don’t believe we’ve been infiltrated. The Machine may have been involved.”

“Copy that.”

“Incidentally, the arrest itself appears to have been unusual."

John is outside, and commandeering a motorcycle. "Was it?"

"Yes, he was waiting for the police when they came." John can almost _hear_ Harriet frowning as she speaks.

He roars through the late afternoon traffic, trying his best to remember whether he'd ever heard of another field agent who looked like him. It hardly seems possible. The agency would have used the likeness for special ops, and Kara would have made jokes about having a spare John. "Well, Finch, if I'd just killed someone, I'd expect the police to show up, too."

"No, Mr. Reese, he was _waiting_ for them. He sat down next to one dead body and half a dozen unconscious bodies, and waited for the police to appear. The arresting officer said that he just put his hands out for them to handcuff him." Harriet speaks quickly, and John can hear her typing furiously as she speaks.

“Sounds like he’s agency, Finch.”

Reese doesn’t know what makes him say this, but the minute it’s out of his mouth, he knows it’s probably true. This guy had the necessary skills to kill one person and incapacitate half a dozen others. He did it in the middle of the day, surrounded by cameras, and then he waited for the authorities to arrive. It practically screams “government operative.”

Why _kill_ , though? He could have gotten arrested for less. If John was planning a mission, and he ordered an agent to get arrested on purpose, the point would be… it would be to use the arrest as a distraction. As a red herring. Or… No - if John was on a mission, himself, and he got arrested on purpose, he would have done it to use the a holding cell as a temporary safehouse. Killing someone in front of cameras would be an extreme, but sure, way to accomplish this.

The question is: is this guy agency, or _ex_ -agency? If he is ex-agency, who is he working with? The use of deadly force on a teenager, that suggests he has few ethical qualms. If he has few ethical qualms… John thinks: this guy might be particularly well-suited for some of the clandestine groups he, John, didn’t want to work with, back when he first went AWOL.

John really wants to talk to this guy. At the corner of 53rd and 8th, John hops off the bike, and merges into the crowd of pedestrians. John will never be one of those people whom nobody notices, but on foot, he can make himself seem benign enough.

But he never makes it to the precinct, because Finch says: "he's escaped."

John keeps walking, and scans the crowd.

"He appears to have removed himself from the precinct without being noticed,” Finch says. “There are no details as to how. What shall we do, Mr. Reese?"

"Don't worry, Finch. We all have the same training. I know where he's going."

It will take less then 30 minutes for John to find Joan; she knows everything; if she hasn't heard of someone who looks exactly like him, no one has. Then, if that’s a dead end, John will get started on surveillance video footage. But Joan is his best bet; field agents go straight to the streets to hide, and -

"Mr Reese. Abort. Abort _now_. We have a new number who is in immediate danger."

*

John saves the number's life, and by nine pm, he’s back in the library. It was a pretty simple case, really, except for the timing - John was all the way across town when Harriet told him to go, and he moved quickly, but if it had taken just three minutes more to get there... Just one blocked-off street, just one upturned truck... it would have been too late.

"It's late, Mr Reese,” Harriet says, in between mouthfuls of takeout.

John is both distracted and full of nervous energy at once. "That's never stopped us working before, Finch."

He wants to find his doppelgänger. He checked the streets on his way back to the library - dead end - and now it’s time to comb through surveillance footage. But Finch is being weird about it.

“I’m sorry to contradict you, Mr Reese, but that is not true. We only rarely work for over 36 hours without stopping, and _never_ for over 48.” She is doing her withering gaze thing. “Now tell me: how long have we been working?”

John sighs. “48 hours." He eats his pad thai efficiently. Would _demanding_ the surveillance footage work with Finch, he wonders? Probably not. “I’m going to look for him anyway, Finch. Without surveillance footage, it’ll just take longer.”

“This man isn’t a number, Mr Reese.”

That gets John’s attention. Since when does _that_ matter? “I wasn’t aware that we were in the business of only helping people who had social security numbers and happened to have been noticed by your clandestine mass electronic surveillance data mining program,” he says.

Something complicated happens to Finch’s face. "I apologize; of course you’re right,” she says. “But it’s late, Mr Reese. You may have the life of a superhero, but unlike Batman - who is _fictional_ \- you are required to respect your body's basic requirements."

John gives in. He _is_ tired. And he’s still wearing his ruined suit from that afternoon. It has _bullet holes_. He really needs to start keeping more than one spare set of clothes at the library. But for now, if he’s going to have to go back to his place to change, he might as well stay, and sleep for a few hours.

"Batman, Finch?" John stands up to throw out the take-out containers. “Does that make you Alfred? ‘Cause we have the wrong income distribution.”

Finch has started taking down photos from the board, and doesn’t answer. From under the desk, Bear whines.

“Don’t worry, Bear, I’ve got you,” John says, opening a container, and setting it down on the floor.

“I do wish you wouldn’t indulge him, John,” Harriet laments.

Every time, John orders more food for Bear. And every time, Harriet tells him that she wishes he wouldn’t. Except she always says it with a tone that suggests that actually, she finds it endearing.

John sits on the desk. “I don’t want to be Batman, Harriet.” He toys with the hem of his suit jacket. It's torn. “And I like you better than Alfred.”

Harriet stills. “Mr Reese, go home,” she says. “We'll look for your doppelgänger in the morning."

John doesn’t move from where he’s sitting. He starts checking for other tears in his clothes. “He’s dangerous, Finch. I know he’s not a number, but -“ he trails off, fingering a rip on his jacket shoulder.

Harriet’s walks over to where he’s sitting. "Are you all right, Mr Reese?” She makes him look at her - presumably, John thinks, to check for a concussion. She’s standing so close to him that John can smell the pomade in her hair.

"Yeah," John murmurs, "I'm fine, Harriet. This _suit_ isn't fine, but I'm -"

"You could have hurt your head -" she says, reaching up to touch John's hair.

John closes his eyes. "Mm,” he says.

Harriet stands between his legs, and carefully checks his scalp. John lets her, but when she moves closer, reaching up to touch the the top of his head, he suddenly finds that he can’t stand to be there. He can’t stand it, he can’t - sitting on this desk, knowing what he knows about Harriet, and not -

“I have to go,” he says, and leaves, without hearing her reply.

***

 

Lana Pierce

Every night, it takes John between 11 and 14 minutes to walk from the library to his loft. It’s always different because he uses a different route every time. Tonight, however, he decides to take a longer route.

The walk should soothe him. But it doesn't.  If anything, he becomes more and more upset.

"What do I have to do?" He asks a random brick wall. "Who am I supposed to be?"

Unexpectedly, a voice answers from the surrounding darkness. "I _knew_ you were interesting."

John stops short. Then he sees, a few feet away, a blonde head. The voice registers.

"Ms. Pierce."

Lana Pierce - college dropout, self-made billionaire, genius IQ, author of social networking site “FriendCzar” - emerges from the darkness. "Please. Call me Lana."

"...Lana." John is so startled, his exasperation has been completely sidetracked.

"Hmm, yeah. Lana. But... Tell you what, though: if you tell me your real name, 'John Wiley', you can call me whatever you want."

John stares down at her. "So how are you, _Lana_?"

Lana gives him a wide, genuine grin. "I'm well, thank you," she says, as she punches a code into a keypad in what appears to be a random brick wall. "And yourself?"

"I'm good." John answers, as a door appears next to the keypad.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think you're good, too." She says, holding the door open for John.

Lana leads John up a series of staircases and passageways. She does it as though the alleyway was a place where she ran into acquaintances who had saved her life all the time. She doesn't even ask John what he was doing in the alley, or why he was talking to himself. And she talks the whole way.

“…Not that processing it using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications is feasible, but it’s also practically never pertinent. And if you ask me, Big Data is like adolescent sex: everybody’s talking about it, no one is doing it. Well. No one except -”

Abruptly, she stops talking, and jogs up one last staircase. At the top, she turns around to look at John, who is is a step below her. They’re standing eye to eye. Lana smiles.

"Welcome to my humble abode, John," she says.

John suddenly realizes what's about to happen. And he can't quite make himself speak. But Lana holds the door open, and John walks through.

*

She offers him whiskey, and John hears himself teasing her, asking if that’s really what she wants them to drink, given past experience? She laughs, and starts digging through a drawer in the whiskey cabinet, while talking a mile a minute. She treats him to her analysis of the rush for Blackphone prototypes (“they’re marketing it like it’s the only phone you’ll ever need, which is a mistake, obviously”), some gossip regarding the McLaren group’s search for a new CEO (“they make the best cars in the world, but they’re not visionaries enough to appoint a woman. Pff.”) and something about paper-thin bulletproof vests, all within 45 seconds. Then she pulls out a handful of epipens, and thrusts them at John.

John can't help it, he smiles, and there's just something about the way she's saying absolutely everything going through her mind, the way she just tells him everything. And he’s just so tired. He doesn’t want to think anymore. Before he can think of what he’s doing, he finds himself moving into the space between them and, even as Lana keeps speaking, he places his hand at the small of her back.

She beams up at him, and John suddenly realizes that she's stopped speaking. The room is silent.

“I’m not gonna ask about this,” she says, fingering a bullet hole in John’s jacket. “Okay?”

John, startled, realizes he’d completely forgotten about his clothes. But before he can answer - before he can even think - Lana stands on tiptoe, puts her arms around John, and kisses him.

It's been months - years - and John hasn't given it a thought. He even walked into this place, knowing what was going to happen, without _really_ giving it a thought. But now: Lana has her hands on him, and John's libido hits him really, really hard.

*

He runs his hands over her, and she moans, heaving up towards him. She’s warm, so warm, and John pulls her towards him, but she pushes him, and they tip over, and land on her couch. Then Lana is straddling him, and John is overcome, choked with yearning, and unable to think.

Lana smells like mint soap and leather, and she writhes in John's lap, making filthy noises. Her hair is short and soft; her skin is flushed and hot. Everything about her is alluring, and when she starts pulling off his clothes, he offers no resistance. John doesn't know how much time they spend in the living room. At some point, however, Lana has manoeuvred him to the bedroom, where she fishes around in a nightstand, while he waits, disheveled and flushed.

Before long, she is handing him several packets, and, without waiting, bends herself over the waist-high mattress and hikes up her dress. Mesmerized, John touches her, runs his hands over her, _admires_ her, until Lana impatiently pulls on his arm, sending him sprawling on top of her. John's nose is buried in Lana's hair, and he laughs.

“Wait, Lana -" he tries to say while he struggles with the condoms, too lust-drunk to rip open a packet efficiently.

The room is still and silent, when John finally rolls the condom on, and it seems… It would be so easy to think that Lana and he are alone in the world. Distantly, he thinks of the library - wasn’t he upset about something earlier? - and it's like thinking of something that belongs in a dream, or in a movie watched long ago. He lines up his cock, slides it back and forth, back and forth over her opening, and watches Lana arch her back.

John pushes in, and Lana’s body seems to stiffen and loosen, both at once. She is facing away from him, but he can tell that her mouth is wide open, like she’s moaning, though no sound is coming out. She curves her neck like a cat, her eyes are closed, and John’s own eyes flutter shut. Soon, he finds himself thrusting deeper - her pleasure is contagious, blissful - and he thinks he must be growing harder. She’s pounding into the mattress with her fists, her spine curving in, and out, she's panting, and he just wants it, he wants… He slips his hand down, touching her belly button and then lower. She groans, and John keeps his hand where it is, holding on until he can feel her shudder around him, and he comes.

*

Later, when John has cleaned himself up and pulled on his boxers, he looks around, trying to think. But Lana pulls on his arm, tugs him down onto the mattress.

Just before he falls asleep, John hears Lana whisper: “I knew  you were interesting.”

***

One month later.

Harriet Finch

After working for eight years on a clandestine mass electronic surveillance data mining program, and then giving it to the United States government, Harriet Finch (real name unknown) was injured in circumstances John has yet to determine. She subsequently went through spinal fusion surgery. She works in an abandoned library, uses dozens of aliases, and used to be engaged to man called Gray Hendricks. She wears clothes that are unnoticeable unless you know a lot about tailoring. Her presence is unassuming unless she looks directly at you. She displays multiple signs of attraction to John, but has rebuffed his advances.

And she knows about Lana Pierce, but hasn't said a word about it.

It has been one month since that night. Since the doppelgänger (who hasn’t been seen since,) the sudden departure from the library, and the unexpected encounter with Lana. And Finch knows. She _must_ know. She might even have been _listening_. She’s been discreet about it - in fact, she hasn’t just been discreet, she’s been _blank wall_ \- but she _knows_. She knows that John spent the night with Lana.

Her response has been… to ignore it. Harriet’s been the exact same competent, commanding, deadpan person she’s always been. And at first, it’s kind of a relief. John is embarrassed, the next morning, and grateful to be spared further mortification. It’s nice to just go back to work, and put it out of his mind.

But then, as time goes by, John finds that he can’t quite put it out of his mind. John’s doppelgänger has utterly disappeared, the numbers are few and far between, and John has nothing else to think about. It bothers him. Not _Lana_ \- she’s not bothering him. Quite the opposite. She told him, the next morning, that it had been a very nice, fulfilling, _one-time_ thing (“Thank you, John, it was lovely running into you. Don’t come here again.”) No, Lana isn’t bothering him.

It’s Finch. Finch’s non-reaction makes no sense. For one thing, how is she so good at being impassive? How? Where on earth did she learn that skill? John _wishes_ he could be that inscrutable, and he used to be a _spy_. The fact that Finch can beat him at the impassiveness game is just embarrassing.

But also: John keeps thinking back to how distrustful Finch had been of Lana, months ago, when they’d saved her life. What had Finch called her? “Just curious enough to be dangerous”? So shouldn’t… shouldn’t Finch be making reproachful noises at John? Shouldn’t she react? Why is she acting like she hasn’t even noticed?

*

It’s early in the morning when the whole thing comes to a head. The sun is shining, the air is crisp, they’ve just brought a criminal to justice, and no one died. But John was thrown off a motorcycle, and he’s fine, he is, but he was on a dirt road, and his shoulder looks like he’s been mauled by an angry squirrel.

“The first time I fell off my BMX, I was six.”

“Please stop moving, Mr Reese.”

“Well, I nearly ripped my shoulder off. I didn’t exactly have a motorcycle coat, so it was way worse than this.”

“Mr Reese, when you are finished regaling me with tales of past injuries…”

“I’m _telling you this_ because like I said, I was six, but I patched it up myself. You don't have to -"

"Shush, Mr Reese. You are no longer six years old."

"I'm only letting you do this 'cause it's on the back of my shoulder and I can’t see a thing, Finch.”

She doesn't answer, and John can't help smiling. They've been having this conversation for two years. John gets a trivial injury, Finch expresses dismay, and John begs her not to fuss. Finch takes out the first aid kit and accuses John of childishness, John kvetches.  They only do it when he’s not really hurt. And it’s nice. It's really... nice.

From his doggie bed, Bear snuffles loudly.

"You know, John, I was thinking -" Finch is peering at the injuries closely, removing bits of gravel. John tries to think of the last time she used his given name.

She continues: “I was thinking, this new bulletproof material, the structured polymer composite they're working on at Rice and MIT -" She pauses. John can feel her breath against his skin.  “Have you heard of it?”

John is still lost in thought, unable to pinpoint the last time Harriet said his given name.

“I was thinking of perhaps commissioning a few prototype vests for you."

The words _structured polymer composite_ make it to John’s brain. “Wait, Finch, what?"

"Well you go through the stock of vests so quickly, and I thought, why not financially support research at the same time as...”

But John knows he’s heard those words somewhere. "Yeah, yeah, but you said: polymer from MIT?"

"Yes! Very interesting research. So you have heard of it?"

John remembers... Something. "Yeah, I have. I can't remember why, but -"

"Well, I'll see if I can get my hands on the working paper, and we'll see from there."

"Sure, Finch, that's -" And then the shoe drops. It was Lana. It was _Lana_ babbling while she looked for epipens. It was Lana who said something about paper-thin bulletproof vests, and researchers from MIT.

"Oh hey, Finch, actually, I remember. It was -" and John is just about to say "Lana Pierce," when something stops him. "...Someone. Someone told me about paper-thin bulletproof vests."

Silence follows this statement. Finch even stops what she’s doing. And John somehow knows that Finch knows what he was about to say. That Finch might even have _thought_ it at the same time, because she - she was listening in, when Lana talked about the vest. Because she heard Lana, too.

Finch recommences applying gauze, and John thinks, distantly, that he should be saying something to ease the tension. But his brain is too busy interpreting Harriet’s silence. It’s like the entire world has finally come into focus. John suddenly becomes aware of the desk he is sitting on, and the colours of the book on the walls that surround them, and the slightly stale air he is breathing, the dust motes suspended in it and the sound of Harriet’s movement, ever so faint and always slightly asymmetrical. He does not say another word, and in the end, neither does Harriet. She dresses the wound quickly, and leaves the room before Reese can turn around to look at her.

*

In the morning, John is hit by a wave of frustration, and realizes that while Finch did, in a sense, give something away, John just doesn't understand. He doesn't understand how the most awkward thing that's ever happened between himself and Finch - the most awkward thing that's ever happened in a professional relationship which involves illegal surveillance, unlicensed firearms, lies, and assumed names -  is a one-night stand _with someone else_.

Because _clearly_ , it upset Harriet. But - is she _jealous_? Somehow John can’t picture her being jealous. Jealousy seems… wrong, on Harriet. And anyway, John _offered_ , and she turned him down. She must have known this would happen at some point.

John goes for a run. He’s always spent a lot of time in physical training, but these days, he’s been pushing himself harder than he ever has. He’s been doubling, even tripling his time in the gym. But he can never quite run long enough, fast enough, make his heart beat hard enough to drown out his inner discontent. And this morning is worse.

The thing is, John likes his job. He likes having a reason to get up in the morning. He likes using his skills on his own terms, he likes rediscovering his capacity for compassion, for _empathy_ , with the numbers, and he likes being on a team with Harriet. And he likes Harriet. He likes her companionship, he likes her humour, he likes her competence, and he likes that she’s the first person he talks to in the morning, and the last person he talks to at night.

And he knows, he _knows_ that having this job, and working with her, seeing her every day, involves doing it on _her terms_. Most of the time, that’s okay. No matter how difficult John finds knowing that Harriet knows everything about him, while he knows almost nothing about her - he knows that carrying on with their work involves _never asking more_.

But this morning, it’s not okay. For years, he was just grateful to have this job, and didn’t care that Harriet wasn’t giving him answers. But this morning…

He runs faster. It’s just so unsettling. The confusion of it all. Years ago Harriet kissed him back, pushed him away, and then said that it was to protect him. Or - did she? She said: “You can’t dictate who I choose to protect.  Or - how I choose to protect them.” Did she mean _herself_? Because so many people around her died? And does she - is she attracted to him, still? And if so, does she trust him? And if she trusts him, why is she still so secretive? Is she only being secretive out of habit, now? Or is there another reason? Will it always be this way? Will John ever know?

And John runs, and runs, and tries to drown out the questions in his head. But he knows, deep down, that they’re going to keep getting louder. It’s inevitable. They’re an unstoppable force. Maybe John never stayed awake at night, pining for Harriet. Maybe he never moodily daydreamed about her while listening to sentimental music. But when he finally stops running - literally, in the middle of Central Park, bent over double and gasping for air - he realizes that he knows why this bothers him so much. And he realizes: he was always going to feel this way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit for the angry squirrel line goes to [marginaliana](http://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana) <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is turning out so heteronormative, you guys, I don't even know. And I'm sorry this is still incomplete.
> 
> Warning: this chapter gets a little cliffhanger-ey.
> 
> Thanks to [marginaliana](http://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana) for beta.
> 
> Thanks to [Charloween](http://charloween.dreamwidth.org/) for editing.
> 
> Thanks to [enemyofperfect](http://archiveofourown.org/users/enemyofperfect) for everything.

John is woken by the ringing of the telephone. It must have been ringing for some time - Bear has jumped up on the bed, and put his paws on John's face. John's eyes feel fuzzy and he can't tell whether it's day or night.

"Hello?"

"We have a new number, Mr Reese."

The memory of his run in Central Park hits John like a hangover. He looks at the time - three pm - and squeezes his eyes shut. Takes a deep breath.

"Hi, Finch."

On the other end of the line, there's a pause. Then Harriet coughs, delicately. "Mr Reese - were you _asleep_?"

"Yeah, I..." Reese fishes around for something to say. "Guess you were right - that motorcycle injury hit me harder than I thought."

Only ten minutes later, however, John is in the library, looking at photos of a man named Gordon Higgins. He lives alone, has no pets, has quiet neighbours, and his photos look like they belong in the dictionary, next to the word "nondescript."

"He has evidently purchased the correct ingredients for several types of explosives, Mr Reese, but I admit to being perplexed as to his motives. Why is this man building bombs?"

"The best terrorists are the ones who don't look like terrorists, Finch."

Finch looks at Reese in irritation. "You don't say," she says, uncharacteristically sarcastic.

John wants to say something, but doesn't.

*

He gets fed up with surveillance around 7pm. Harriet is right: there's something about this guy that's more than a harmless appearance - it's _actual harmlessness_. And John has no patience today.

Harriet is yelling into his ear as John rings Gordon Higgins's buzzer, but John ignores her. "Mr Higgins?" he calls out.

"Yeah?"

"My name is John Reese, Mr Higgins," he says loud and clear into the building's intercom. "I need to talk to you."

Mr Higgins, like an actually harmless man, buzzes John in. Well - harmless, not crazy - he buzzes John into the building, but he doesn't take the chain off his door. John speaks to him right in the hallway.

"Sir?" John says.

The man on the other side of the door raises his eyebrow at John. "What can I do for you, man?"

"Mr Higgins, have you ordered ammonium nitrate prills through the mail recently?"

Higgins blinks. “Come again?” He’s wearing an apron, and drying a beer glass with a red and white checked dish towel.

"Our information indicates that a large number of small packages of ammonium nitrate have been sent to this address."

“Sorry, guy, I have no idea what you're talking about."

“So you’ve never contacted the Mustard Seed co-op and placed small orders, to be delivered every two weeks?”

“Nah, man, I - oh. Oh!" Gordon Higgins steps back from the door for a moment, then comes back, having removed his apron. "You mean those envelopes full of little white beads?”

“Yes, they would have the appearance of white beads.”

Higgins nods. “Got em all here. You want em?"

On the comm line, Harriet says "wait, what?"

"Yes," John tells the man. After a moment, he adds: "please."

"I only opened a couple of 'em, but they all look the same so they gotta all be full of the same stuff. You came here at the right time, my friend. Just about to throw them out.”

A moment later, Higgins is handing John dozens of envelopes. He hands them, one by one, through the door: paperback-sized packets, making soft bead sounds when they were moved. They are all identical; only the postmark is different.

"No note, no return address, no nothing," Higgins says. “Dunno why I kept them, really.”

John just nods at the man.

*

Back at the library, John dumps the envelopes on Harriet's desk. "Either that guy honestly has no idea that this is the main component of fertilizer bombs, or he's the best liar I've ever seen."

It was something about the way the man had just handed everything over to a stranger who hadn't even shown a badge, like he had no idea how that could possibly go wrong for him. He’d just casually said goodbye to John, without quite looking up at him, before closing the door. If John had been secretly hoarding explosive material, and he'd been playing innocent when someone found out, he would’ve been looking directly into that person's eyes. He would have wanted to see if they'd believed his story. But this guy had just asked if John knew what the envelopes were about. In return, John had just given him his best Secret Agent look, and told him that he couldn't comment.

"Yes, well," Harriet sighs. "I'll continue monitoring his bank account and security feeds, regardless.”

"But what are we going to do with this?" John gestures towards the pile of envelopes.

Harriet raises an eyebrow. "Explosives aren't really my area of expertise, to be perfectly honest."

"Well they aren't mine either, but we really can't just throw these in the garbage."

Harriet narrows her eyes at the envelopes. "I suppose they could go into one of the storage spaces."

“With proper security.”

“With proper security,” Harriet repeats.

"Got any properties out in the country?" John asks. "I could buy some fuel oil, do a few test runs, see if I could make some small bombs -"

"Good heavens, Mr Reese," Harriet interrupts. "Surely you aren't anticipating a need for _bombs_."

John is indignant. "I said _small_ bombs."

*

Later, John goes for a run with Bear. His second run of the day, he realizes, and at this rate, he'll have to double his calorie intake to make up for all the physical activity. But Bear is thrilled. He runs ahead, and looks back periodically, as though to check whether John is still there, and his tongue hangs out in canine glee. John lets himself feel Bear's enthusiasm, and once they reach the dog park, he watches affectionately as Bear plays with the other dogs.

It's eight pm, which seems to be a busy time at the dog park. The place is full. As John watches, Bear chases one of the dogs, a teenage labrador, and crashes into him (her? John can't tell) when the labrador comes to an abrupt stop. Something about the pratfall strikes John as unexpectedly silly, and he laughs.

Suddenly there's a voice in his ear. "Mr Reese?"

"Finch?" John touches his ear and prepares to signal Bear, ready to head back to the office.

Harriet coughs. "I... Is everything okay, Mr Reese?"

"Yeah, Finch." Reese frowns. "Bear is getting some quality dog time. I'll be taking him back to the loft soon, everything is quiet... Why? Everything okay on your end?"

"Yes." She sounds distracted. "Apologies. I thought I heard you laugh, and I..."

"Oh, yeah..." John smiles. "Bear did something funny. I wish you'd seen it. Well... maybe you did, there's got to be cameras around here..."

"Oh, I wasn't -" Harriet stammers, and there is a flurry of keyboard noises. "Here, let me find the surveillance feed..."

"Oh, sorry, Finch, if you were doing something else, you shouldn't -"

"No, no, it's not... Oh, here we are." There is an obvious smile in Harriet's voice as she says: "oh, oh Bear."

There's something oddly pastoral about sitting in a park, like this, surrounded by fluffy, frolicking animals. The March air is cool, but the temperature is high enough for the snow to be melting, and everything smells a little bit like springtime. John is tempted to pretend that all is right with the world.

"I can take him back to the library, if you want, Finch - I mean, I've had him for the past few nights. I'm sure he's missed you."

There is a pause on the other end of the line. "I suppose - well, if it isn't any trouble."

"Sure, Finch." Reese whistles for Bear. "We'll be there in a few minutes."

*

On the way back to the library, a bike messenger runs over John.

“Mr Reese, I appreciate the fact that your work is dangerous, and that you are therefore prone to injury.”

John rolls his eyes.

“But could you _try_ to avoid injuring yourself in the course of standing on a sidewalk?”

The bike hadn’t even slowed down before hitting John. The messenger hadn’t been hurt - he’d been wearing a helmet, and was clearly practiced in the art of falling off his bike. Also, he’d fallen on top of John. John, however, hadn’t had anything to break his fall - he hadn’t even had both hands, because he’d been holding Bear’s leash - and his head had hit the pavement.

He’s not up to banter. “The fact that I didn’t see the guy is bad enough. You don’t have to mock me about it.”

John’s ear is pretty badly scraped. He’s sitting in the lowest chair they have, with a desk lamp shining directly on his ear while Harriet peers at it, armed with disinfectant. This should be a familiar scenario, Harriet having patched him up so many times before. But John is still reeling from the past two days’ events. And somehow, banter doesn’t make John happy when he’s injured himself during personal time. 

Harriet is bending over him, her face close to John’s ear. “I’m sorry, Mr Reese,” she says, softly.

Something in her tone makes John feel abruptly, incongruously vulnerable. The fall has given him a headache, and he’s still wearing his sweaty workout clothes. He just wants to go home. He just wants to turn off all the lights and hide under the covers. He just wants to close his eyes and hug Bear.

“You shouldn’t sleep.” Harriet says.

John blinks. “Oh.”

“You hit your head very hard - I saw it, it bounced off the pavement - I expected you to walk in here with memory loss, to be perfectly honest. Your pupils look fine and you don’t currently have any symptoms of a concussion but you shouldn’t… You shouldn’t sleep.”

“Right.”

Soon, Harriet has applied a surprisingly unnoticeable adhesive bandage, and starts packing up the disinfectant and other supplies. She isn’t saying anything. John wonders what she was doing before he got here. He never did find out what she does or where she goes when he isn’t with her. He knows better than to ask, now, though.

“Thanks, Finch, for…” John gestures at the first aid kit.

Harriet looks up at him. “Of course.”

John turns around to get his coat. He does feel a bit peculiar, like he’s jet-lagged, except he hasn’t been travelling. Probably just the nap earlier in the day, he thinks. He almost never naps.

Turning back, he finds that Harriet’s eyes are still on him. John blinks at her. “Finch?”

“Would you… Have you eaten, Mr Reese?”

*

They get pad thai and bring it back to John’s loft. Finch also insists on stopping for coffee, which puzzles John until he realizes that it’s _for him_. Finch’s personality will forever be a source of bemusement. She is unknowable. She contains multitudes. She is a vigilante. She is a software engineer. She is a billionaire. She springs for coffee.

When they finish their meal, John gathers their dishes. He takes them into the kitchen. Harriet remains seated, watching him.

"So Finch, you know that studies show that it isn't necessary to stay awake following concussions, right?"

Harriet clears her throat. “Yes,” she says. "I don't know why I said that."

From where he's standing at the kitchen counter, John tells her, "well. I didn't correct you, either."

When John was a boy, the kitchen was always a place for long, introspective conversations. Something about standing at a kitchen counter still provokes what little loquaciousness he has. What else are you going to do, while washing the dishes?

"Hey Finch, you know, earlier?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Earlier, when I was at the park with Bear."

"Yes?"

“And you were alone in the library.”

“Yes.”

"Well - what were you doing?"

Finch doesn't immediately answer, and John, with a horrible sensation in the pit of his stomach, realizes that he asked her a personal question. He asked it; he knows he said it in an innocuous voice, but that doesn't matter, that's the same voice he uses when he's trying to extract information. He didn't mean to do it - she isn't a mark, she isn't an intelligence-gathering problem, she _isn't_ \- but she doesn't know that. Panicking, he turns to her -

"Finch, I'm sorry, I didn't -" But Harriet, simultaneously, is saying "I was working on your aliases; I try to update the -"

They both stop speaking, and then say "sorry" at the same time. And for one, glorious, moment, John thinks Harriet is going to laugh. But she just looks at him. Then she says, "do you have anything to drink, John?"

Thirty minutes later, they're watching Homeland together, and John pressing pause every ten minutes to tell Harriet what's wrong with it. "Who sends a white girl to the middle east as a covert operations officer, anyway? That's like sending me to gather intel on, I don't know, a lesbian separatist commune."

Finch nods sagely. “Think you couldn't blend in?"

"You know…” John pauses. Considers. “I don't think I was ever any good at blending in. I was just good at planning strategies and killing people."

Finch does not answer. John finds himself scrambling for something, anything to say.

"You're really good at blending in, though," he tells her.

She looks up. "Yes, I suppose I am."

"How do you do that?"

"I... I hide in plain sight, John.”

John looks at her, at her posture and her clothes and the tortoiseshell comb in her hair, and blurts out “Yes, but... how can anyone take their eyes off you?"

It's not that John Reese normally thinks everything through before saying things. It's that when he isn't working, he normally says nothing at all. He doesn't really know whether he's just said something inappropriate, but it was still more than he ever meant to give way. He wishes he could take it back.

Harriet's response, however, takes John completely by surprise. "I couldn't comment on the thoughts or behaviours of others, John, but I am tempted to suggest that if my appearance is routinely overlooked, it is in a way similar to that in which your intelligence is repeatedly underestimated."

For the first half of his life, John took every compliment at face value. He did not always know what motivated people to praise him, but he had been raised to nod and say "thank you," so he did. Sometimes he paid other people compliments, and they did the same, so he knew it was right. When he started working with Kara, however, the rules changed. She flattered him regularly, but not always kindly, and John, not knowing otherwise, nodded and said "thank you." And Kara laughed. She did more than laugh, in fact: she mocked. And John, after a while, stopped saying anything.

So he listens to Harriet imply that she thinks him intelligent, and he does not say anything. He just looks at her. He looks, as she turns her head, and stands up. He looks, as she pulls her coat on, and hooks Bear's leash to his collar. He watches her hastily leave the room, and, through the surveillance cameras, John sees her leave the building.

In the morning, John thinks about Harriet. He thinks about the look in her eyes, when she'd pushed him away, and he thinks about the look she would have (might have?) if he touched her face, intentionally, without any plausible deniability. He thinks: what if he placed his fingers on Harriet’s temples, her hairline, her cheekbones? What if he was close enough to know which shampoo she'd used that day? What if he was close enough to hear her breathing in, and out, and what if she didn't push him away?

He goes for his morning run, and John thinks about apologizing. He’s not sure how he’d say it, or even what, specifically, he’d be apologizing for. He thinks about telling Harriet, “Hey, Finch, remember when I kissed you? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't know any other way to be with people. I thought you were trying to use me." And he thinks about telling her, "I wouldn't do that again," except it wouldn't be true, not exactly.

He wouldn't try to use her own attraction to him against her. He wouldn't do that again - and in fact, John thinks, he would never even _dream_ of doing that. It is _unthinkable_ to him. And when did that happen? When did he become someone who wouldn't even consider breaching Harriet's privacy?

An hour later, he is walking into the library. Tea in one hand, scones in the other. He skips up the library steps, making his daily assessment of the dust levels on the books (all clear, no intruders, only Bear).

He sets the tea down on Harriet's desk. "Morning, Finch."

"Good morning, Mr Reese."

And something in Harriet's voice makes John's heart drop. It sounds... deliberately flat. John pushes a scone towards her. She doesn't look up at him.

"Anything happen so far today?" John asks

Harriet doesn't stop typing. "No."

John blinks. There's something about her expression - it's formal in a way John would never have associated with Harriet, until today. He suddenly finds himself standing taller, almost at attention. He mentally reviews the location of each weapon in the room. Harriet’s silence continues, and John reviews the location of every safe house they maintain in New York City. Then he reviews the travel time to each one of them, and then he visualizes the location of each surveillance camera on the way.

John is just about to start reviewing his worst case scenario outlines (informally titled “Contingency Procedure” and meant to be reviewed in order of probability) when Harriet stops typing. “We have a new number.”

*

Thirty minutes later, John is breaking into a vehicle. It’s in a secluded parking garage, and parked in a space suspiciously devoid of surveillance. The number’s name is Geneviève Mansell, and the false bottom in her car trunk is full of containers.

“It’s been a while, Finch, but this packaging looks like nitroglycerin.”

“ _What?_.”

“Six containers in total- I’d say three litres. This - Finch, you could take down the entire block with this.”

On a hunch, John looks over the cars in neighbouring parking spaces. He lets Harriet’s voice wash over him; finds himself relieved to be at work, knowing what he has to do, and when he has to do it.

The dust and grime patterns on the cars are just a little bit… wrong. And it was easy to break into the place. Which isn’t _surprising_ , but… John looks at the containers of nitro and finds himself thinking about taking fingerprints. He also wants to review the footage on the surveillance cameras - he knows nothing will be on them but maybe… Lately, John finds himself getting ideas about cases, just from looking at surveillance footage, no matter how tangentially related the footage might be. As a matter of fact, he realizes that he does not know what made him break into Miss Mansell’s car before he looked through her apartment. He hadn’t planned to. He made the decision when he was standing in front of her building.

“Mr Reese?”

“I’m listening,” he says, crouching down to look underneath an SUV.

“I can’t get a hold of security footage for the parking garage for the past two days.”

Something is very wrong, and John suddenly feels a wave of warm and cold, both at once. And the last time he felt this, he was… All of a sudden, and for the first time in his life, John Reese is feeling the years since his first field experience.

Picking up the containers, he starts to make his way out of the parking garage. This number is getting weirder by the minute, and John wants to get out of here. Right now.

“Hey, Finch?” he asks.

“Yes?” she murmurs, very close to the receiver.

“Remember ‘Lethal Weapon’?” John asks, opening the door to the stairwell.

On the other end of the line, Harriet huffs out a laugh.

John starts climbing the stairs. “Do you ever find yourself wanting to say -“

Harriet cuts him off. “ _I don't make things complicated,_ ” she says, deliberately misunderstanding him - and doing a passable impression of Mel Gibson - “ _that's the way they get, all by themselves_?”

*

“ _I’m too old for this shit_.” Harriet declares, looking at the containers.

Unexpected language, coming from her. It suddenly occurs to John that Harriet’s discomfort with weaponry and dangerous substances is one of her most endearing qualities. “Yeah… at least those fertilizer pellets were technically a legal substance. These are - well, I don’t know where the hell they came from, Finch.”

“Never mind that - what are we going to do with them?”

“Actually, Finch, there’s a couple of things I want to know before we worry about bomb disposal.”

The sheer incredulousness in Harriet’s eyes, when she turns to look at him, is priceless. She doesn’t say anything, she just looks at him with something between disbelief and terror. From the corner of his eye, John sees Bear cover his head with his paws. John abruptly remembers that she has never been this close to something that could blow up the entire neighbourhood. 

“I’m… sorry, I meant - they’re properly packaged. We’re not in danger.” John finds himself moving an arm, wanting to touch her shoulder. “I didn’t say that to provoke you, Harriet.”

Harriet clears her throat. “Of course.”

“We need to know two things: where did these come from, and -“

“And why did we get this number. Yes. I agree, Mr Reese.”

They settle in to review what little information they have, before John sets out again. Early afternoon light fills the library, and, sitting side by side, they work quietly. John reviews footage of the garage, as well as the surrounding neighbourhood, and Harriet reviews her notes on former numbers. Bear sleeps between them.

The thing John _really_ wants to know is whether these people - Gordon Higgins and Geneviève Mansell - are in danger. “Do we still have eyes on Gordon Higgins?”

“Oh - yes.” Harriet types something into her keyboard, and gestures towards one of her screens. Grainy footage of Mr Higgins appears in one corner. “Here, I’ll…” she adds, typing in a few more commands, and a second image appears, this one of Miss Mansell.

John looks at the screen, assessing. “It’s like - it’s not just that they’re relevant numbers we shouldn’t be getting. It’s that they’re… it’s like they’re not even numbers. Or they’re being framed.”

“Yes, and John,” Harriet turns to him, her eyes searching his, “has it occurred to you that someone is missing here?”

John nods.

“If they’re not irrelevant… where is the Agency?”

*

It’s late afternoon when John decides to go fetch them some tea and blintzes.

"You know, Finch,” he says, setting Harriet’s tea down on her desk, “at the agency, they made us take these workshops every year, called ‘Stress Coping Mechanisms’. I keep running them through my head, today, and realizing that most of them are impossible for us."

Harriet blinks. “What?”

"Well for example, stress coping mechanism number seven was ‘discuss the source of stress with your peers.’ But that’s no good for you, is it? You can’t discuss anything with peers - you don't _have_ peers."

“Whereas you do?” Harriet asks.

“Well, I’m pretty sure I have peers. I can’t be the only agent to have gone AWOL and lived.”

Harriet nods. “No, I suppose not. But -“

“Actually,” John interrupts, “you probably know more about that than I do. When you hired me, there must have…” he stops, mid-sentence.

“Yes, Mr Reese?”

John clears his throat. “I can’t have been your only candidate.”

Harriet chokes on a mouthful of tea.

“Finch?” John asks, a hand on her shoulder

“In any event,” Harriet croaks, “consulting these purported peers to discuss your sources of stress is not a practicable option.”

John nods. “They never do leave a forwarding address.”

Sunlight catches Harriet’s hair, and John suddenly finds himself wondering how long Harriet’s hair is; what it looks like, undone, tumbling over her shoulders. Did she ever leave it undone? Ages ago, before they ever met? Before they both turned into the people they are now? It seems so long ago, John thinks. He thought people had good intentions, then. It’s only later, when people used him, that he made himself think he had to use them in return. He wonders what it’s like for others; whether any ex-field agents ever find a way to trust people. If it always feels like life is going to turn into an abusive game at any moment.

“We should have a support group,” he says.

“I beg your pardon?”

“For ex-field agents,” John says. An image flashes through his mind, of a dozen trained killers in a community centre, talking about their past, like a terrifying AA meeting. They would need a weapons check at the door. And maybe nondisclosure agreements.

Harriet raises an eyebrow.

John smiles. “Or maybe just a Help Manual.” He’s trying to make Harriet laugh, he realizes.

She is still looking at him. The colours of the tweed she’s wearing complement her eye colour - little flecks of blue in the fabric, like her suit has captured little bits of the sky - and John finds himself unable to look away. Her expression is unreadable, familiar, precious. Whatever has been giving him the idea that she is a mystery, he wonders? He doesn’t know her name, sure, and she might as well be an ex-KGB sleeper agent, for all John knows. But the truth is, he knows her better than he’s ever known anyone. He knows what she looks like when she’s deeply focused on a problem, and he knows her favourite Chinese restaurant in New York. He knows what it means when she goes silent over the phone line, what kind of films she likes to see when there’s nothing to do on a weekday afternoon, and what she looks like when she’s sleepy. He know just how much violence Harriet thinks is too much violence, he knows that she endures far more pain than she lets on, and he knows that she gave him a purpose. He knows that she works all the time and he knows that her voice is the first thing he wants to hear in the morning, and the last thing he wants to hear at night. 

John is moving into the space between them before he even realizes he’s doing it. “Harriet.”

At the same time, Harriet turns towards one of the monitors, her eyes focused back on her work. Suddenly, the distance between them seems unsurmountable.

John swallows thickly. “Finch?”

“Miss Mansell is leaving her workplace,” Finch says, staring at the monitor.

John snaps back to reality. “She’s - but she shouldn’t be leaving now, she’s -

“Yes, her office hours are 8:30 am to 4:30 pm.”

On the monitor, Mansell is on the sidewalk, typing on her phone. As John watches, she hails a cab. “I don’t like it, Finch,” John says.

“She’s headed towards a… hedge fund office? She just looked up their address, at any rate.”

“Why?”

“No idea. But it’s not very far from here.”

John looks at Harriet. Harriet looks back. They pull on their coats.

“They’re called Black Tree Advisors. Their CEO is a Mr James Black.”

The place is two blocks away. Harriet sends John the building’s blueprints; then she checks NASDAQ and NYSE quotes on her phone. John revises contingency plans.

“Just walk in?” John asks.

Harriet nods. “Yes.”

They’ve played the wealthy investor and her bodyguard/boytoy often enough that there’s no need to discuss the details. Harriet will more or less barge into the CEO’s office, and wave a lot of money around. John will improvise.

They run into the number in front of the building. “Miss Mansell!” Harriet calls out.

She is dressed like a college student and her reddish-blonde hair is a mess of unruly curls, but she is a surprisingly imposing presence. She frowns at them. “Do we know each other?”

“No.” Harriet tells her. “And ideally, after today, we’ll never meet again.”

Harriet and John have, at this point in their careers, perfected the art of saying just enough, but not too much, while looking just commanding enough, to properly interact with the numbers. Within a few minutes, Mansell is telling them how she has ended up here.

“I took this weird meeting the other day, this guy… He kinda looked like you, actually,” she said, gesturing towards John. “And he didn’t… Something didn’t fit. Next thing I know, somebody’s broken into my car and left a bunch of - well, what looked like dangerous materials, I didn’t touch them - and _then_ takes them out by the time I decided to call the police. Makes no sense. And just…”

“Yes, of course,” Harriet tells her. “You want to ask him what’s going on.”

“Yeah.”

John interjects. “He isn’t expecting you?”

“No.”

They tell her to go home.

Harriet only needs to hand a business card at the reception desk. Within ten minutes, she is invited in to see the CEO. One of the receptionists takes the two of them down a corridor, towards the door to CEO James Black’s office. John has no idea what’s about to happen, and he’s fairly sure that Harriet has no idea either.

On the other side of the door, a man in a dark suit is standing behind a desk. He is tall, has dark hair, and blue eyes. He looks up with a bored expression, until he spots Harriet. Then - John would swear to it - he makes a movement like he’s _checking for his weapon_.

Harriet stops short. “Mr Stern!”

Time seems to stop, and John’s brain is assaulted with information. The size of the office (21 feet by 15 feet by 9 feet), the orientation (northwest), the bookcases (not attached to the wall), the large paperweight on Black’s desk. The size of the window and the thickness of the pane; the distance to the elevators and the location of the stairwell. The look of shocked _recognition_ on Harriet’s face and the briefest flicker of panic in Black’s (Stern’s?) eyes. The height, measurements, hair colour, eye colour of the man - identical to John’s.

He speaks. “Hello, Harriet.”

For a moment, John’s vision blurs, and he can’t breathe.

“James,” Harriet says, inflectionless. “James Stern, I identified your body two years ago.”

Stern gestures towards John. “Is this your new hire?”

“James.” Harriet says. “You were dead.”

Stern looks John up and down. “I’ll say this for you, Harriet: you have a type.”

John wants to edge closer to Harriet, and shield her. He wants to pick Harriet up and run out of the building with her. He wants to kill this James guy.

But he waits for a cue from Harriet. She’ll know what to do. She’ll tell him who this man - whose first reflex, upon seeing Harriet, was to _check for his weapon_ \- is. But she doesn’t. Without turning, without looking at John, she just says:

“Mr Reese. Leave us, please.”

*

John waits in the lobby for three minutes before deciding to get out of there. The relevant numbers, the explosives, the people being framed, and now this guy: something is wrong. John checks his earpiece and makes sure he can hear everything going on in Stern’s office, and goes to pick up the secondary sets of backup passports and identity documents.

They're not the last resort IDs, but they're not the ones he and Harriet normally use. John keeps these sets of IDs - Harriet's as well as his own - in his John Wiley safety deposit box. John thinks, distantly, that one of Harriet's aliases should marry John Wiley, so she'd be able to get to this box if anything happened.

Harriet and Stern are still talking. "So you've had this one for a while," John hears Stern say.

“This one?”

"That overgrown tabby cat you got to replace me. What did you call him? John?"

It's not a conversation, it's a chess game. "I didn't call him anything, James."

There's a rustling, and then a long silence. For a moment, John thinks Harriet is about to take out her earpiece. But instead, she just seems to have moved her scarf, and if anything, the sound now comes through slightly clearer.

"And what does he call you?" He sounds like he's trying to make her uncomfortable on purpose.

But Harriet has, apparently, no intention of taking the bait. "Why did you fake your own death, James?"

There's a silence, and then Stern pretends not to have heard the question. "Do you still use that library?"

"Why are you asking me questions when you know the answers?" Harriet's voice sounds wrong, like she's… perplexed, angry, and overwrought, all at once.

"I missed you, Harriet." Stern says her name softly, almost like -

"Is that why you set up an office two blocks away?"

“Did you tell him your real name? Show him where you live?”

“James -“

“Or did you only do that with me?”

*

John’s brain goes to emergency conditions. From what he can hear, this man has knowledge, staff, resources, and _completely unidentified information_. He has to assume that even the safe houses are compromised. John doesn’t even consider returning to the library, and even Harriet’s home - which he has never seen - isn’t an option. John has to take their entire set of contingency plans and throw it out the window. He has to get rid of his earpiece.

“Finch, I’m getting rid of my tracker and earpiece,” he says, hoping she hears. “I’ll send you a location when I find a place to regroup.”

John goes to a second safety deposit box and takes out half of the cash, and starts walking. He just starts… walking. Maybe it’s time to go back to the streets, he thinks. Find an alley with no cameras. Bear would like the fresh air.

… _Bear_. He’s still in the library. For this, at least, he is prepared. John quickly jogs to an alley three blocks from the library, and speaks a few words, in Dutch, into a microphone. Minutes later, Bear is bounding towards him.

John and Bear set off in a random direction, John waiting for inspiration to hit. Looking at security camera locations and foot traffic and police presence, and tries to think: what would someone trained by the CIA _never_ think to do?

It’s starting to get dark, and John is dangerously close to letting himself think about Stern’s tone of voice, when he said “I missed you, Harriet,” when he and Bear wander into an alley that seems like a complete blind spot, except for one camera. It’s familiar, though, it’s -

“Lana,” John says, looking at the camera.

The entrance had been through one of the brick walls, he remembers. Lana had pushed a button in the wall… somewhere… It was here, John thinks, looking at the alleyway. He’s sure of it. He starts feeling the bricks one by one, running his fingers over them. Where had Lana gotten her inspiration for this system? Diagon Alley?

Before he can find a button, or a sensor, or a keypad, a door opens in the wall. It doesn’t make a sound, and John wonders if he really _has_ been dropped into the middle of a spy novel. Then a blonde head pokes out from the doorway.

“John Wiley, as I live and breathe.” She sounds as flippant and bold as ever.

And John suddenly finds himself at a loss for words. He’s here precisely because this is a thing he wouldn’t do. He would literally prefer to sleep in an alley than ask someone like Lana for shelter. But that’s exactly why he’s here. Should he - should he _tell her that_?

Lana suddenly stands aside. She says, “Don’t stand in the alley.”

John goes in, with Bear, and Lana closes the door. But before John can move forward through the building, Lana puts her hand on his arm. “You shouldn’t be here, John.” She says it - she says it like she _means_ it, somehow.

“I - I don’t want -“ John has no idea how to say that he’s not here for a repeat of their last encounter. He’s never been this person; he doesn’t know what people say. What’s he supposed to say? ‘Don’t worry, I have no desire to get in your pants’?

Lana’s eyes do something complicated. There’s something distinctly strange about seeing her here, like this, early in the evening. John’s last visit had taken place during one of those strange in-between times, sleep-deprived and upset, so late at night that it was practically morning. Now - now it isn’t even completely dark outside. John wants to say something - he wants to - he has to explain what he’s doing here. Without actually saying anything.

John looks deep into Lana’s eyes. “We’ve been compromised.”

She raises her eyebrows. “What, you and this… dog?”

“Yeah. And also Finch.”

Lana nods slowly, almost comically. “You’ve been… compromised. And you’re here because you… need an alpha site?” The incredulity she manages to inject into those words is impressive.

John suddenly realizes that if Lana does not let him in, he could only take her apartment by force. Would Harriet want him to do that, he wonders? There are other safe house possibilities. It’s just that it’s the best one.

But before he can say anything, Lana says: “What the hell. I was getting bored with this place anyway.”

When they walk into her apartment, Lana points John and Bear to the living room. “I’ve gotta make a phone call,” she says, waving her hand into the air. “Make yourselves… you know.”

When she has left the room, John looks around for a way to contact Harriet. Lana has electronics lying all over the place. He runs through his usual protocols, only to remember that he needs to do what someone trained by the CIA would never think to do.

Feeling like an idiot, John picks up one of Lana’s telephones, and without dialling any number, speaks directly into it. “Tell Finch where I am. Just - tell her where I am.”

John looks at Bear, willing him to say that Harriet is fine, and will be there soon. But Bear only makes a pitiable face back at him. Then Lana walks in, a bottle of scotch in each hand.

*

Hours later, there is no sign of Harriet, and Lana is on her fourth glass of scotch.

“I’ve always wanted to be a spy,” she says.

Her behaviour has been positively restrained all evening. She made friends with Bear, gave John some food, and then spent most of the evening talking about tech IPOs. She hasn’t even asked John to tell her his real name.

"You don't really mean that," John answers, without thinking.

Lana frowns at him. "How do you know?"

“You wouldn’t like it,” John says.

“Reeeeeally," Lana drawls in response.

“You… when you don’t want people to know what you’re doing, you… You like misdirection.” John has had a few glasses of scotch himself. “You make loud noises in one direction so people won’t look in the other. It makes sense, because you’re good at it… You like being the centre of attention, and you like it when people have the wrong idea…”

Lana raises an eyebrow, and seems to become very still.

“But a really good spy doesn’t do that. The really good ones go by unnoticed.”

Lana leers at him. “But you certainly don’t go unnoticed.”

“I was only an average spy, Lana,” John answers. “But you - you’d never be happy being an average anything.”

Lana - incongruously - starts laughing. It begins as a quiet, personal burst of giggles, and somehow keeps going, until she is doubled over, splashing scotch on her dress. "I can't believe you just said that," she says, tears running down her cheeks, "with a straight face."

John pours himself some more scotch.

"I mean - you're right about me not wanting to be average. But John, my little tabby cat, the only person in the world who can cheerfully imply that they're 'only average' is someone whose skills are so far above those of everyone else, that they downplay them just to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable." For a moment, Lana seems to lose her train of thought, but then she turns, suddenly, and looks straight at John. "I mean, _come on_. You're practically Batman."

Inexplicably overcome with childishness, or perhaps just alcohol, John puts out an arm and shoves Lana. "Shut up," he says.

Lana shoves back, still giggling.

"Harriet called me Batman once, I think," John says.

"Did she?" Lana drawls. "That doesn't make sense. That would make her Alfred. But she can't be Alfred - your income distributions are wrong."

John grins. "That's what I said!"

“And if anything, _you_ are _her_ hired help.” Lana says it absently, reaching out to the bar for another bottle.

John wants to contradict her; wants to tell her that he's tried to turn down Harriet's money. But an image of James Stern saying ‘is this your new hire?’ appears in his mind, and he suddenly feels foolish. He reaches for the whiskey bottle. Where is Harriet? It’s been hours. He needs to talk to her. He needs to look into her eyes. He needs her to look up at him and ask if he’s all right. He needs - and John suddenly realizes: seeing Harriet won’t be reassuring, it’ll be excruciating. She’ll look up at him and John will think ‘you have a type’ and think that he’s been kidding himself all these years - he’s not her partner, he’s a pet she keeps in a loft. He drains the rest of his glass.

“Oh hey, there,” Lana reaches across the coffee table and puts her hand on his. “Did I poke you where it’s sore?”

Something suddenly occurs to John. "Did you..." he says, tilting his head. "Did you call me a tabby cat, a minute ago?"

"Oh," Lana’s smile seems frozen, for a moment. But then she stands up. "Don't worry, John,” she says, grinning wider. “That's no comment on your masculinity." And before he can say another word, she's on his side of the table, and crawling into his lap.

"Lana -" he says.

She runs her hands over him. “You’re big,” she says, “and strong, and this thing where _I’m_ rescuing _you_ right now, that’s -“ Lana takes both of John’s hands in hers, and slides them down to her backside. “Really working for me.”

“Mmmm,” John groans, hit by a wave of lust.

"So let me get this straight," Lana says, her arms around John's neck. "You're 'compromised', which, presumably, means that someone - someone _bad_ \- knows about you…” She looks inquiringly at him, as though trying to get answers from his facial expressions. “And they… could find you no matter where you go?” The look in John’s eyes must mean something to her, because she backtracks. “Ohhhhh that’s not it, is it? It’s… that you don’t know what they know."

As she's saying this, she's grinding herself into his lap. John used to be good at dealing with this, he was, but it’s been so long. She's warm, and she smells good. John’s pulse is all over the place, he can’t think of why he should make her stop, he doesn’t want to think about anything.

"Why are you here, John?" she asks, as she reaches into his trousers.

John groans, and drags his lips along Lana's jaw. "I have to go off protocol," he answers.

“You sure do,” Lana answers, and kisses him.

*

Hours later, the morning light wakes John from a dream. In the dream, Harriet was sleeping by his side, and his head was on her shoulder. He felt safe and happy.

Slowly, he becomes aware that the shoulder he was sleeping on was Lana’s. They're on her bed. She is wearing his boxer shorts and nothing else. Bear is slumbering quietly at the foot of the bed.

Then Harriet walks in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to conclude this chapter with an excerpt from marginalia's beta notes.
> 
> "Lately, John finds himself getting ideas about cases, just from looking at surveillance footage, no matter how tangentially related the footage might be."
> 
>  _I know you are not going for this, but wow I was just struck by a passionate desire for a fic in which the machine is programming itself into John's consciousness in order to take over his body in a creepy cyborg way. ANYWAY. I'm just sharing that._ :D
> 
> Take that as a prompt, dear readers.


	5. Chapter 5

Up until yesterday, Harriet thought James Stern had been a field agent whose demise had been the end of tragic man. Stern was so utterly without family or friends that John Reese seemed outgoing in comparison, and whose identity had been methodically erased by Harriet herself. His body, once Harriet had identified it, had been buried under someone else’s name.

Or so she thought. His death was a lie - maybe everything else was too.

Harriet is tired and keyed-up, and she really wants to see John. She wants to look into his eyes and tell him everything she knows about James Stern. When Harriet walks through Lana's living room and sees John's jacket crumpled on the couch, she knows, rationally, intellectually, what she is about to find. But somehow, there is no preparing for the sight of John sleeping peacefully with Lana Pierce, his head on her shoulder, Bear at their feet. The faint smile on John's face. The serenity of the scene.

She knows that John has spent the night with Lana before. She heard part of it; there’s no pretending it didn’t happen. But somehow, in the days that had followed, and until today, there hadn't been a sign of them being in each other's company, and Harriet - when she'd allowed herself to think about it - had written it off as an aberrant occurrence.

John’s eyes open just as Harriet walks through the open door. But before either of them can say anything, Bear stands. He trots up to Harriet, but stops just short of her, looking at her questioningly.

"Yes, Bear, it's good to see you." Harriet whispers. She pets him softly, taking her time. 

When she finally looks up, John is buttoning his shirt, and Lana is sitting up - wearing nothing but John's boxers - and frowning at her phone. Harriet looks away.

Harriet was once told that envy involves two people - yourself and another person - while jealousy involves three. Envy is when you want the attributes or possessions of another person. But jealousy is when you want something that is between two other people. And, apparently, jealousy feels like being torn - no, wrenched - by near-intolerable irrational feelings to which Harriet does not feel entitled.

“Mr Reese, we have a new number.”

*

They sit at Lana’s kitchen table. John, evidently, does not know where to look. He stares at the walls like he’s never seen them before. Harriet takes a deep breath.

"I took the liberty of visiting the emergency supply cache.”

John finally looks at Harriet. “The what?” he asks. His surprise is gratifying.

“I keep a storage space. For emergency conditions. I keep it stocked with the items we use most often. There is no way to know how long Stern has been observing us, so there is still a possibility that he knows about it. But it seemed like an acceptable risk.”

There are two suitcases; one containing a dozen vests, communication hardware, and first aid kits. The other has clothes for both of them and an assortment of John’s favourite weapons.

“Do you… Do you keep statistics on which weapons I use the most, Harriet?” John asks, rooting through the suitcases.

“Yes.”

Cradling a P226R in a vaguely adoring manner, John gushes, “thank you. And -“ John turns to look at her. His voice changes. “And, Harriet -”

Harriet places her hand on the table; rather more suddenly than she intends to. “Mr Reese, please don’t -“

“No, Harriet, I -“

“Mr Reese,” she says, cutting him off as brusquely as she can. Words cannot convey the intensity with which she does not want to hear a word about Lana Pierce. “Please,” she winces. “Please.”

When she looks up, John is staring at his hands. He seems cowed, and it’s an unsettling sight. John Reese is a violent alpha male; violent alpha males aren’t intimidated by mousy, introverted women in their fifties.

“Now.” Harriet pulls out a file holder. “James Stern."

John sits. He looks up at Harriet. His eyes are big, and blue, and guileless.

“I hired James Stern approximately six months before I hired you. The Machine found him, really. He was far more qualified than his predecessor -"

John visibly flinches.

Harriet coughs delicately. “One might say that you are the living embodiment of the phrase 'third time's a charm'. As I said, Stern was very good. Perhaps I should have been suspicious of the fact that he asked very few questions - contrary to you, he never wanted to know where the numbers came from - but as you know, I was inexperienced then. I suppose I still am. Those are his files - I erased or corrupted his personnel files, police records, and identity information, just like I did for you, of course. Those hard copies are all that remains. I’m not sure why I kept them. I destroyed yours long ago.”

She is rambling, Harriet realizes. “In any case, he died. That is - I thought he died. Now I know that… Whoever it was, whoever’s body I identified, James must have killed them. I suppose he would have known how to…”

John clears his throat. “He would know how to terminate someone and make sure that whoever found him thought the body was him.”

A morbid part of Harriet wants to ask John how many people he has killed to use the corpses as stand-ins for himself. But she doesn’t. “I can’t imagine why he faked his death. Did he think this was a job he couldn't leave?”

"I'm starting to think,” John speaks up, suddenly. “I’m starting to think that’s the wrong question.”

Harriet nods. “Yes, I agree.”

“Maybe it’s not: why did he fake his own death. Maybe it’s: why did he work with you, in the first place.”

They both consider this for a minute. Then Harriet speaks up. “There’s something else.”

*

Long ago - really long ago, before The Machine, Harriet was just a wealthy programmer with a small circle of friends. A very small circle. Of one friend.

Harriet had met Nathan in college. They'd started at the same time and had most of their classes together. Nathan’s was a familiar face, but Harriet never so much as said hello until one night in the computer lab, when he’d walked up and asked for her help on an assignment. Even then, they had spoken to each other only occasionally. But in their final year, Nathan had asked Harriet to partner up with him for a project.

The project had been all-consuming. The combination of Nathan’s seemingly unreasonable concept, Harriet’s unusual competence level, and their combined bullheaded zeal had turned out to be an effective combination. By the end, they had taken to sleeping in alternating shifts in the computer lab. And the project had been unexpectedly - no, outrageously - successful. So successful, in fact, that while they still knew remarkably little about each other, they both understood that they were now bonded for life.

Harriet, on some level, was aware that she and Nathan were... Or rather, she was aware of what they _weren’t_. Sometimes, she noticed the skin that appeared when he rolled up his sleeves, and the eyelashes that fanned out over his cheekbones when he slept. She noticed women (there were no other women in the computer science department, but they met female students on campus) found Nathan attractive, and he found them attractive. She saw the way his eyes sparkled when he tried to make a girl laugh. And she noticed that Nathan never tried to make her, Harriet, laugh.

They founded IFT together shortly after Harriet graduated, with very little discussion. Nathan was always going to be the face of the company, and Harriet was always going to be in the background. Women just didn’t lead tech companies back then. In fact, they didn’t lead companies, full stop. Writing those roles into their IFT’s articles of incorporation had been a mere formality.

Time passed. Harriet sank deeper and deeper into each new project, barely noticing the years go by. Nathan met investors and found mistresses, and took to talking to Harriet as though she was his confidante, or perhaps his confessor. He made excessive, preposterous purchases, the kinds of things only billionaires would ever consider. A vintage airplane. A rhinoceros sanctuary. Voltaire's correspondence ("oh, I didn't know you understood French, Nathan!" "...I don't.")

One day, Nathan purchased a disused section of the New York subway.

*

“You’re kidding.” John stares. The station is empty when they get there, with all access points still sealed.

“Frankly, until today, I’d forgotten about this place. I remembered it and looked up the deeds to the property an hour ago, in the hallway outside of Ms. Pierce’s door. I believe it’s an acceptable alternate site.”

“No kidding.”

John shines a flashlight up into the massive, vaulted ceiling, and Harriet fights down an urge to make a Ghostbusters reference. Or was it Ghostbusters II? The one where they found a river of pink slime in the subway. 

"Dark in here, Finch."

"Yes. Nathan had it outfitted with basic amenities - I believe it was his intention to hold ‘underground parties’ here - but obviously, the electricity bill hasn’t been paid in some time”

John wanders off to investigate. “Hey, the plumbing works,” he calls out. “Are there bedrooms as well? When everything’s set up, Finch, you should probably sleep for a while.”

Sleep is for the weak, Harriet thinks, distantly. Who used to say that? Was it Nathan? He always defined his own worth in terms of approval, which always seemed to be best earned during the night hours. It was the 80s, she supposes. Sleep wasn't very fashionable. She herself mostly slept on the floor of her office.

“As it happens,” Harriet points her flashlight at a door further down the platform, “there is only one bedroom.”

*

The new number, Ms. Wanda Petrowski, is the owner of a bodega called Wanda Grocery, opened in 2002. Her security system, including surveillance cameras, were updated ten months ago. She has eight employees and very little turnover. As usual, there is no way to know whether Ms. Petrowski is a victim, or a perpetrator.

“Yeah, nothing at her apartment is suggesting one or the other. All I can tell you at this point is that she really likes shoes. And Star Trek,” John tells Harriet.

“Perhaps the security footage from the bodega will tell us more.”

“Sure.” There’s a silence on the other end of the line, and then John speaks up. “Look, Finch, I’ll tail the number for a while. You get some sleep.”

But John’s investigations go absolutely nowhere. He follows Ms. Petrowski as she visits her dry cleaner, her accountant, her produce guy… After five hours of nothing, he heads back to their new, temporary, headquarters.

It’s dark and gloomy when John exits the elevator. For a moment, he wonders if he’s in the wrong place - it looks, feels - even _smells_ abandoned. But then he hears Bear trotting up to him, and feels him licking his hand.

“Hey, Bear,” John whispers as he turns on his flashlight.

Harriet went to sleep without removing her glasses, and they are askew on her face. She didn’t even take the clip out of her hair, but strands have escaped, framing her face. She’s used her coat as a blanket, pulled up all the way to her chin. There is an improvised doggie bed at her feet.

John sits on the bed, intending to wake her. She turns her head, sighs in her sleep, and her expression changes, as though reacting to something in a dream. In just a split second, it goes from soft and unguarded, to determined and unyielding. John blinks, and thinks, “I’m so in love with you.”

Harriet opens her eyes. “Mr. Reese,” she whispers.

John reaches out, and straightens her glasses. “Finch.”

They look at each other. The city rumbles above them. Harriet is so, so beautiful.

She clears her throat. “How is Ms. Petrowski?”

“Fine. Nothing happened.” John stands up. “I cloned her phone, put a tracker in her bag.”

Later, after they’ve gotten some more work done, had dinner, and walked Bear, they lay out two sets of blankets on the bed. The setting is unfamiliar, and it occurs to John that in the years they’ve worked together in the field, they’ve never slept side by side. But here they are.

He turns off the lights, and the world becomes pitch black. Distantly, he can hear the nighttime hubbub of the city, and he closes his eyes. The sound of Harriet’s breathing at his side, Bear standing guard at their feet, John falls asleep.

It is still pitch black when John wakes, six hours later. This is what it’s like to wake up in a cave. A really urban cave. He was dreaming… not about a cave, but about a dog. About _being_ a dog, he realizes. But he couldn’t find his collar.

Reaching out for his gun, John switches on one of the lights. All clear. Next to him, Harriet stirs, and opens her eyes.

“We have to decide what to do about Stern.” John tells her.

Harriet sits up. “What?” she mumbles, her hair tumbling down over her shoulders. It's long, all the way down to her elbows.

John hands her her glasses. “What does he want?” he asks.

“I… I don’t know. I don’t know.” There is a small pillow crease on her left cheekbone.

They decide to take turns using the bathroom. John counts their lighting sources during Harriet’s turn. They have approximately three days worth of light, he thinks. Should he get some NVDs, just in case? Stern is in the back of his mind, John realizes. Taunting him.

“Do you remember what you said to Stern to get him to work for you?” John calls out, through the bathroom door.

Harriet shuts the water off. “I didn’t have to handcuff him to a bed, if that’s what you mean.”

“But what did you say to him, exactly? Did you tailor your speech for each of us? Because maybe…”

Abruptly, Harriet bursts out of the bathroom. “I promised him anonymity,” she says, flush with the realization. “I promised to erase all his records.”

“That’s…”

“Of course.” Harriet seems to deflate. She sits down at the desk, heavily. “He kept working for me until he was certain that I’d erased or corrupted his personnel files, police records, identity information… That’s why he… Of course.”

*

Harriet spends most of the morning double-checking that every possible access to their station is sealed. It isn’t a station as such; it’s the abandoned lower level of a station. From what Nathan told her, back when he purchased it, no one knew exactly why the level was built, though the rumour was that it had been built to block the expansion of a competing service, back when there were multiple subway companies. Nathan had a washroom and an access elevator installed, and then had all the other access points blocked. He’d had planned to hold special events there (“underground parties that are literally underground, Harriet!”) but then he’d met someone new, and apparently forgotten all about it.

John is working his way through Ms. Petrowski’s contacts list, in order of most-to-least called. He checks in periodically. “Everything okay on your end, Finch?”

“Yes, Mr. Reese.”

Nathan was always leaving things behind and moving on. He’d even left MIT behind before finishing his degree. The only constant in his life seemed to have been Harriet. Harriet, whom Nathan could not leave anyway, because he needed her. They had needed each other, really: Nathan and Harriet were, respectively, IFT’s surface and substance. Nathan always used to joke about being Remington Steele, except without the sexual tension. Not that Harriet had cared, exactly. She was never attracted to Nathan. But sometimes she saw the kind of women he was constantly dating - tall, coquettish, glamorous - and she’d felt invisible.

“Nothing’s happening up here, Finch.”

Time trickles by. It would be so easy to start brooding, in the darkness. This is what it must be like to live in latitudes where there is no sunlight for part of the year, Harriet supposes. Except worse. Humans aren’t meant to live underground.

Neither are dogs, for that matter, she thinks, casting an apologetic eye on Bear. He looks up at her mournfully.

“I’m sorry, Bear,” Harriet says.

“What’s wrong with Bear?” John asks.

“Nothing, Mr. Reese. I was apologizing for the current living conditions,” she says, petting Bear, who has put his head down on her lap. “Though I suppose I was projecting my own feelings on the matter.”

“Yeah, darkness gets rough pretty quick. I was on a job in São Paulo in ’98, had to camp out in a basement for a week…”

While John regales her with the details, Harriet wonders whether that woman, Kara, had been with him. She must have, though John carefully doesn’t mention her. From what Harriet has found, Kara Stanton had been a cruel, unhappy person whose coping mechanism had been to torment people who trusted her. And John, she knew, had trusted Kara. Strangely enough, Harriet finds herself feeling marginally less despondent at the thought. However dire the current circumstances may be, at least no one is psychologically torturing John.

Turning towards her monitors, Harriet checks up on the two previous numbers, Gordon Higgins and Geneviève Mansell. They’re both at work; nothing untoward seems to have happened to them. Not that that means anything, Harriet realizes. Geneviève Mansell’s case was forty eight hours ago, and Gordon Higgins was only the day before that. But with everything that's happened, it feels like... Weeks. The past few days have been so surreal. Like falling down the rabbit hole. Rather too literally, Harriet thinks, looking up at the gloomy darkness around her.

It just escalated so quickly. Three mornings ago, The Machine gave them a number that should never have been classified as Irrelevant. And then the next day, it did it again. And _then_ , it then turned out that the numbers had been framed. At which point John’s predecessor, James Stern, showed up.

Harriet starts to make a list of questions that need answering.

1) Why did The Machine give them the numbers?  
2) Were Gordon Higgins and Geneviève Mansell framed by the same person (or persons?)  
3) Why haven’t any government agencies gotten involved?  
4) What does James Stern want?  
5) Is James Stern a threat?  
6) Who should Harriet call about the nitroglycerin that is still at the library?

All this in just three days. Except that really, Harriet thinks, it all started before that. It all started weeks ago, when John spent the night with Lana. Somehow it’s all linked up in Harriet’s mind - the entanglement with Lana, and James Stern returning from the dead. And this bizarre behaviour on the part of The Machine - numbers with illegal explosives? Being _framed_? Too many events Harriet had somehow failed to anticipate.

*

When John comes back a few hours later, the knuckles on his right hand are bleeding.

“Should I even ask?” Harriet says. It looks terrible. The skin is mangled, the bruise already forming. But he hadn’t said a thing over his earpiece.

“Some idiot tried to mug me. I was just gonna punch them, but halfway through the punch I realized the mugger was a woman.” John closes his eyes, clearly embarrassed. “Got confused, ended up hitting the brick wall behind her.”

Harriet rolls her eyes and digs out the first aid kit.

“You’re gonna have to retire me, Finch. My reflexes are shot. I get run over by bicycles, and injure myself through a misguided, retrograde sense of chivalry.”

“Did you happen to take your mugger’s name?” Harriet asks, deadpan. “Perhaps _she_ would like your job.”

*

Like the day before, they work for a little while and eat some dinner, and then John walks Bear. But when they turn in, instead of immediately falling asleep, they talk. Their voices drift through the murky, dusty station, up towards the roar of the street above, and they can’t see each other. It’s a bit like talking over their earpieces.

Harriet lies flat on her back, staring up into the darkness. “I keep thinking about sending a note to my seamstress, to ask for a change of clothes,” she whispers softly.

John smiles, and turns onto his side to face her. “You’d have one hell of a return address to give her.”

“And then I remember that… I remember that Stern must be watching her, just like he’s probably watching my regular dry cleaner, my drugstore, our friends at the NYPD, the library…” She sighs. “Golden Szechuan.”

“I wonder how long it’ll take for Golden Szechuan to notice we’re - hey wait.” John says. “Your drugstore?”

“Well… yes.”

“What are you doing for painkillers?”

“I’m fine, John.” Harriet says his given name without thinking. “I have enough fentanyl for at least three months.”

She just likes hearing his voice so much. Harriet closes her eyes. Sometimes she wonders where she would be if she’d never found John. She would probably be dead.

John whispers. “I saw Gray Hendricks today.”

Harriet stops breathing. “What?” She’s never even heard John say her fiancé’s name before.

“Just for a second. He didn’t see me, he was in a cab.”

“Oh.” He’s still safe.

“Finch?” John says.

“Yes?”

“I know what it’s like to leave someone behind. If you want to talk about it.”

It would be so easy, Harriet thinks, if it were that simple. “I… try not to think about Gray." A long silence. "There's no point to it."

John doesn’t say anything.

"I told myself I was protecting him," Harriet says. The irony, of course, was that The Machine had chosen him because he was the only person without a dark secret, while Harriet herself had been nothing but dark secrets. "But he would never have chosen to be protected in that way."

Gray had known her as an alias, and now he thought she was dead. "It was for my own peace of mind. I never took his peace of mind into consideration. Sometimes, I think I feel worse about that than I do about the fact that I… that for all intents and purposes, I faked my own death." A gasp. "Oh my goodness, Mr. Reese. I never realized that. I faked my own death, didn't I?"

"…It happens to the best of us?” John says.

Harriet turns to look at him, but only sees darkness. Not even a silhouette or a shadow to suggest where John is. But then there’s a rustling sound, some movement, and suddenly John is holding her hand. His skin is warm, and he squeezes her fingers gently. She falls asleep.

*

Harriet wakes to the feeling of John’s fingers brushing her hair back from her face. They’re lying in separate sets of blankets, but he is so close that she can feel the warmth radiating from his body. She opens her eyes, but it’s still pitch black underground. Still half asleep, she turns into his touch before she can stop herself, moving her cheek towards his palm. He stills.

“What time is it?” Harriet whispers.

John moves his hand again, brushing his thumb over her cheekbone. “I’m not sure,” he says. His voice is low and gravelly. “Morning.”

“I’m going to use facial recognition software on the surveillance video.” Harriet says, sitting up in the dark. “The video is the likeliest source of The Machine’s information. We haven’t seen any suspicious activity, but maybe a statistical analysis of customer visits can tell us something.”

John doesn’t answer.

When Harriet reaches out to turn on the lamp, there he is, looking at her.

It is possible, very possible, not to have sex with someone. It is difficult to tell someone to stop looking at you like making you feel safe and happy is all that is ever going to matter to them.

*

By late afternoon, Harriet has found that the same man has been entering the bodega every day for three days, walked around for exactly three minutes, and left without buying anything. This person is never dressed the same way. He is not exactly disguised, but the outfits are noticeably different. However, he always look straight at the camera, so there is no ambiguity regarding the facial recognition.

“If the pattern continues, he should be at the bodega in exactly forty-seven minutes, Mr. Reese. 5’6’’, 160 lbs. Brown hair and brown eyes.”

John has settled into a booth in the coffee shop across the street. “I’ve got a clear view.”

At the appointed hour, however, John doesn’t see him. Harriet watches the man enter the bodega, wandering through the aisles, wearing a bright red parka, black pants and black shoes. But John does not see anyone of that description on the sidewalk.

“That’s - but he came in by the front door.”

“He couldn’t have.” John says, voice is flat and definitive.

Harriet blinks at her surveillance monitor. “Well in any case, he will be leaving the bodega in a moment.” The man is wandering back towards the exit as she says it, and Harriet adds. “There he is now.”

“Harriet? There’s no one leaving the bodega.”

“You - I beg your pardon?”

Harriet’s first thought is that John has somehow stationed himself in front of the wrong bodega. But she checks, and there he is, across the street, a shot of him clearly visible in the coffee shop’s surveillance video. She then verifies that the man did leave the bodega, and sure enough, going back 30 seconds, there is the red parka going through the exit. She then checks the surrounding street cameras. None of them have shots of the other side of the exit, but there is footage of several surrounding streets. But the man is nowhere to be seen.

*

John gets back to the station by late afternoon, and Harriet joins him, above ground, at a restaurant nearby. The sun is shining, the early spring weather spectacular. Harriet feels like a wraith, unfit to dwell in daylight.

“We should get some light therapy boxes if we’re still down there next week.” John says.

“Do I look so unwell as that?”

“No. Just a little pale.” John smiles. “Like a heroine in a gothic novel.”

When the waiter comes by with their order, John explains that he talked to the bodega employee, who was no help at all. Apparently, not only has the man disappeared into thin air - the store clerk has never even seen him.

By the time they’ve returned to the station, Harriet’s irritation regarding the day’s incomprehensible developments has reached its peak.

“I give up,” she says, removing her eyeglasses and pinching the bridge of her nose.

John turns toward her. His chair is next to hers, at the desk, so that when he turns, they are very, very close. “Finch?”

“I’m tired. I can’t look at these monitors anymore,” she says.

John nods. “It’s only nine. Want to go see a movie?”

The way he says it is so affectionate. Harriet looks at him, and it would be so easy, wouldn’t it, to live in John Reese’s world. The way he gazes at her: would that the world be so straightforward as the unequivocal trust in his eyes.

“No, Mr Reese. Thank you,” she says, heading towards the bedroom. “I’m just tired.”

*

Three hours later, Harriet wakes up thinking about Lana Pierce. There is an image of Lana, shirtless in the morning light, which has been in the back of Harriet’s mind all day. John is there as well, at the edges of Harriet’s memory. Crouching by Lana’s bed, gathering his clothes. She thinks about the way that he couldn’t look her in the eye. What happened, she wonders? What were the steps that led to John and Lana spending the night together? Something about the logistics of it all escapes Harriet, like a puzzle with a missing piece. The motivations of all the people involved somehow don’t add up. Why would John… Why? _Why_?

He is asleep beside her; she can hear the soft sound of his breathing in, and out. A distant, analytical part of Harriet’s mind recognizes that that there is something healthy about John’s libido expressing itself. He had been celibate ever since Jessica died, and he was a wreck when Harriet found him. Psychologically speaking, it was probably a good sign for him to be able to have sex again. Regardless, Harriet suddenly feels a ludicrous urge to wake him up and ask him why, why would he be celibate for years only to suddenly have a fling with that ridiculous woman? _Why_?

She checks the time: midnight. Harriet closes her eyes, willing her thoughts to move on, but when she opens them everything around her is dark, just like the insides of her eyes and there is nothing to distract her, nothing to make her stop thinking about how she can’t, she just can’t. She can’t understand what’s happened. And she can’t tolerate the idea that _maybe John will do it again_.

At that thought, Harriet finds herself turning away from John, and curling into a foetal position. She’s such an idiot, she realizes. What had she thought was going to happen? She hadn’t… She hadn’t thought at all. She had never pictured it.

Perhaps this, Harriet supposes, was why The Machine had pushed her towards Gray. Maybe The Machine _knew_. Gray would never, could never provoke this kind of wrenching feeling. 

“Are you awake?”

Harriet stills. “Yes,” she whispers.

John touches her shoulder, just with the tips of his fingers, as though asking her to turn around to face him. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she lies, and doesn’t move.

“Are you sure?” he asks again. “We had a hard day, I mean -“

“I’m fine.”

“Finch?” John whispers. “I don’t think you’re telling the truth.”

There is a long silence. He’s right, Harriet realizes. He’s right, and she promised never to lie to him.

“You’re right. I apologize, Mr. Reese, I -“

John’s hand, still at her shoulder, moves down, to squeeze her arm. Harriet forgets the rest of her sentence, and she means to move away, but then John rubs his thumb back and forth, back and forth, and something about the movement quiets everything in Harriet’s mind.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Bad dream?”

“No.”

“You must be used to much better beds than this,” he says, now running his hand up and down the full length of Harriet’s arm.

She nods, forgetting he can’t see. “Mr Reese,” Harriet whispers. “I promised I would never lie to you.”

Sighing, John moves forward and puts his arms around her waist. Several moments go by, then, as though he is waiting for Harriet to push him away. But she doesn’t move, she doesn’t make a sound, and soon John moves even further into her space, and wraps himself around her. He isn’t so much spooning as he is clinging to her, and he is warm, and solid, and Harriet falls asleep.

*

At six am, Harriet wakes up, and she knows.

“They built a set,” she says, sitting up in the dark.

The cameras at the bodega had to have been tampered with, but Harriet hadn’t been able to think _how_. They hadn’t been set on a loop, she’d checked. But the discrepancies between the feed from the bodega’s cameras, the feed from the surrounding cameras, and what John saw... The man in the red parka had only been seen in the bodega’s cameras and nowhere else. It had to have been the cameras.

“Someone built a set of the bodega somewhere,” Harriet says, turning on the lamp. “And just - switched the feed occasionally. The attention to detail…” She rubs her eyes. “Not a single sugar packet out of place, someone dressed up exactly like the store clerk. It’s so bizarre,” she says, turning towards John.

“But would explain it,” he agrees.

They dress in a hurry, and head out. Harriet walks to the bodega, wearing utterly uncomfortable overalls and carrying the ID cards of an electrician called “Harriet Weaver.” John takes Bear, and two firearms, and walks to a park two blocks from Harriet.

They needn’t have bothered with all the covert security protocol, as it turns out. The morning shift employees at Wanda Grocery cheerfully bring Harriet a stepladder, and help her up to check the wiring on the security cameras. It only takes a minute to find what she’s looking for.

She walks back to the station and dumps it on the desk.

John nods gravely. “That’s a receiver.”

*

It only takes a minute to locate the source of the transmission, and there's nothing special about it, just a building in Queens. Nothing special about the owner’s name and tax records. Nothing special about the previous owner, or the people who built the place.

"I hate to tell you the obvious, Mr. Reese, but this might just be a wild goose chase. Someone could just have been standing in front of the building with a transmitter."

John frowns as he pulls on a bulletproof vest. “I don’t know, Finch. Somebody went to the trouble of filming some fake security footage and transmitting it directly into the security system at Ms. Petrowski’s bodega. Sounds like they want us to find them.”

“Other than a camera at the main entrance, the building has no security system whatsoever. I won’t be able to see you.”

“Okay.”

“But I will be listening," Harriet says, reaching for her earpiece.

John checks his holsters one last time, and shrugs on his jacket. "I know," he says, taking a step towards her. Without thinking, Harriet angles her head up to look at him, and suddenly John is brushing back a strand of her hair, and he's bending down to kiss her cheek.

Harriet jerks back. "Mr. Reese."

John looks stricken. "I'm sorry," he says.

*

"No one's answering the door, Finch."

“I’m trying to buy the property," Harriet answers. "But I think it will probably be necessary to break in, for now.”

"Steel door and a keypad. This is going to take a few minutes."

Harriet spends several minutes over the phone, listening to a succession of voice mail messages, and eventually speaking to someone who identifies themselves as "Mr Bouvier's personal assistant." When she turns back to the monitor, the building's security cameras show her Reese, bent over double, investigating the door. He appears to be feeling around the edges of the frame, and eventually he stands and lifts his arms to reach the top. His jacket is raised up a bit, and stretched across his shoulders. And maybe it's the springtime slowly making its way into the city, or just the lingering feeling of John's hands on her, safe and familiar in the dark, but suddenly, Harriet wants to climb him like a tree. It's like her libido has suddenly started screaming at her, and won’t stop.

"Hey Finch, guess what?"

Harriet answers, breathless. "Yes, Mr. Reese?"

"I'm not saying we should do this now, but back in the day, I would've gotten into this place with explosives."

"We are _not stocking explosives_ , Mr. Reese."

John turns to the security camera and grins. "Then again, I could try getting in through a window." 

Soon, he is breaking a window so quietly that Harriet only hears a soft thud through the comm, and moments later he's narrating his visit.

"There's nothing on the ground floor, just empty rooms. It's like... it's like a condo building but with no one in it." Harriet lets his voice wash over her. "I'm gonna try the basement next and... huh."

"What is it? Please, Mr. Reese, I don’t have a visual."

"Nothing, just that this door was open."

*

John has a bad feeling about it, but he takes the stairs two by two, firearm in hand. "The lights are on down here, Finch,” he tells her. The basement is just like the ground floor, empty and spotless. Not a speck of dust in sight. Neither in use nor abandoned.

"Ever think there's something ominous about places that are _too_ clean, Finch?"

One room leads into the next, and all the doors are unlocked. The hinges don't make a sound. Even ventilation seems to be turned off, making the entire place silent. Which makes it all the more surprising when John opens the door to the last room.

In an otherwise empty room, James Stern is sitting in a chair. "Mr. Reese. Took you long enough."

He looks self-assured, but somehow ridiculous. The combination of his calculated pose on the chair, and his goatee makes him look like he’s pretending to be a James Bond villain. John rolls his eyes.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

With a drawl, Stern answers, “Same as you. Selling my services to the highest bidder.”

“And who would that be?”

Stern smiles broadly. “I ask the questions.” He gestures towards a second chair. “Sit!”

“Sure.” John can humour him for a while.

“I’ve been looking for some information for a long time, and I’m tired of doing it the long way.”

John nods. “So you thought you’d just ask me.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me,” John asks. “Have any of your marks _ever_ disclosed information you wanted… just because you went up to them and _asked_?”

Stern completely ignores the question, and responds with, “Who worked on Harriet’s data-mining program with her?”

The question is so unexpected that John has to replay it in his mind. And, incongruously, he wants to laugh. The thought of Harriet ever needing help from anyone is nothing short of farcical.

“ _Who worked on it with her_ ,” Stern repeats

John stares. “Seriously?” he asks, “you know I don’t know anything. Why are you even asking?”

“Is Harriet’s program adapting?” Stern asks.

“Is The -“ John sits back. “Is this about a computer program?”

“So there _is_ a computer program.”

John takes a deep breath. He’s been preparing for these questions since the beginning. What’s surprising, really, is that no one ever asked before. “Of course there are computer programs. Harriet is a programmer. You know that just as well as I do.”

Stern’s voice doesn’t change. “Is Harriet’s program adapting?”

“Am I really here so you can interrogate me about a _computer program_ , Stern?”

“Is Harriet’s program adapting?”

“Really? Is this _really_ what you’ve lured me here to talk about? I’m her muscle. I can’t tell the difference between HTML and random symbols on a screen. What makes you think I know anything?”

“I don’t. But I’m not speaking to you. I’m speaking to her. She’s listening in, isn’t she?” Raising his voice, Stern jeers, “Harriet!”

John is on his feet and taking a step towards Stern before he catches himself. Stern wants to talk to Harriet, he realizes. So let him talk to Harriet.

Removing his earpiece, John holds it out to him. “Maybe you should speak to her directly.”

Stern reaches out for the earpiece, and just as his hand closes in over it, John pulls on his arm, and throws him on the floor. He lands with a heavy thud, and John flips him onto his stomach and pins him down. The earpiece lands next to Stern’s head.

John raises his voice. “Who hired you?”

“Don’t you know yet?” Stern turns his head, trying to look at John. “You should.”

“Who hired you?”

Stern doesn’t answer immediately, and John twists his arm harder. His hand opens and closes, like he’s clutching at John. John pushes his knee further up on Stern’s back, and puts his weight into it. Stern shrieks.

“I don’t want to talk to you, you glorified lapdog,” he snarls. “I want to talk to her. ARE YOU THERE, HARRIET?”

John’s patience has run out. “WHO HIRED YOU.”

Stern stops struggling, and smiles so widely that John can see the corners of his eyes crinkling with delight. He says, “Lana Pierce.”


	6. Chapter 6

Sometimes, when John Reese wants a laugh, he reads the wikipedia entries about espionage.

> Human Intelligence (frequently abbreviated HUMINT) is intelligence gathered by means of interpersonal contact, as opposed to the more technical intelligence gathering disciplines such as Signals Intelligence, Imagery Intelligence and MASINT. NATO defines HUMINT as "a category of intelligence derived from information collected and provided by human sources." Typical HUMINT activities consist of interrogations and conversations with persons having access to information.
> 
> The manner in which HUMINT operations are conducted is dictated by both official protocol and the nature of the source of the information. Information sources may be neutral, friendly, or hostile, and may or may not be witting of their involvement in the collection of information.

But it turns out that, while wikipedia doesn’t accurately describe what it’s like to be a field agent, it’s still saying something John should have been paying attention to.

Realising that Lana has been playing him throws John off, and within seconds, Stern has flipped him over. John grapples at Stern, fumbles the grab and only manages to pull the gun out of Stern’s suit jacket. But before he can try to point it at anything, Stern jabs something into the side of his neck, and John blacks out.

*

Harriet hears a struggle, then a crunch, and then a dead silence over the comm line. This isn’t the first time they’ve been cut off, but before she’s even had time to think, Harriet is pulling on a bulletproof vest.

“Stay, Bear,” she says, pointing. “I’m going to get John.”

John’s tracker shows him only a few doors down from where he’d just met Stern. Harriet gets into a cab, and tries to think of all the ways John taught her to break into buildings. She recalls the list of techniques and repeats them to herself. One by one, she thinks: _Check if it is already unlocked or broken. Get a neighbour to buzz you in. Pick the lock. Dismantle the keypad…_ and on, and on. By the time the cab drops her off in front of the building, she’s centered.

The door to the building does not have a handle. It’s just a steel rectangle in a brick wall. There is a keypad next to it, but…

“Well, well,” a voice says behind her. “Look who’s here.”

Harriet becomes rooted to the spot. “Lana Pierce.”

“Harriet Finch. Or should I call you Harriet Wren?” Lana asks. “Harriet Crow? Harriet Starling?” She pauses meaningfully. “Norma Burdett?”

A flash of rage courses through Harriet, and then she suddenly feels very, very calm. She turns. “What do you want, Ms. Pierce?”

“Who, me?” Lana asks, her hand fluttering up in a gesture of mock-naïveté. “I just want a little chat. What do _you_ want?”

“I want John Reese.”

“Mmmm,” Lana purrs. “You do, don’t you.” She moves forward, punches a few numbers into the vaguely familiar keypad, and the door opens. “Welcome to my humble, ah, place of employment,” she says, gesturing for Harriet to enter.

In silence, they ride down an elevator to a basement, and find themselves in a huge room full of cubicles. Dozens of people are milling about. They hardly seem to notice Lana’s arrival.

“My office is over there,” she says, gesturing towards a door on the other side of the room. Harriet follows her, glancing at computer monitors covered in post-its, twentysomethings wearing earphones as big as their heads, and whiteboards with illegible writing along the way. Halfway to Lana’s office, there is a slight shift in the air. A hush comes over the room.

“Is that -“ someone whispers.

“No way,” someone else answers.

At the far end of the room, a young man catches sight of Harriet, and promptly drops a stack of papers. “Oh my god,” she hears him say.

Something about this place is wrong, but before Harriet can say anything, Lana ushers her into her office. “Please sit, Ms Finch,” Lana says. A moment later, James Stern enters.

Harriet sits, though she feels cramped and awkward with the bulletproof vest underneath her clothes, and has no patience for this. “Where is John?”

Stern and Lana sit down. “Nearby,” Stern says.

“Why is his -“ Harriet’s question is cut off when Stern shows her John’s wristwatch. “I see.”

“Ms Pierce suggested there might be a tracker in this,” Stern tells her.

Only fitting, Harriet supposes. She got the idea after Lana gifted John with a bugged wristwatch. It seemed more convenient than planting trackers in every single one of his suits, or in his shoes. He would have found them the minute he tried going through a metal detector.

Harriet sees them both looking at her intently. Is this an interrogation, she wonders? Or are they about to make some kind of revelation?

Lana speaks first. “Ms Finch,” she says, “you wrote a clandestine mass electronic surveillance data-mining program, and gave it to the United States National Security Agency.”

Harriet blinks. She looks around Lana’s office, and the questions about The Machine suddenly start making sense. So _that’s_ what this is about. Lana Pierce, programmer, creator of social media platforms, hired James Stern. She must think The Machine can do something for her. She must think… She must think that something about the data aggregation design can help her. No - Harriet corrects herself - she must think it worth a lot of money. At least as much as it must be costing her to hire Stern.

She takes a deep breath. “I get the feeling that you don’t need me to confirm or deny anything, Ms Pierce.”

“No. No I suppose not.”

“Where is John?” Harriet asks again.

Lana looks at Stern, who nods. Then she looks at Harriet. “We’ll give him back to you, if you give us access to your program.”

Harriet isn’t sure how to even begin to answer that. After some hesitation, she says, “…no.”

“I just want to look at the code,” Lana says.

Harriet nods. She knows Lana only wants to look at the code. But, “that’s not possible.”

Stern speaks up. “It won’t hurt anyone. It might even help.”

“You can’t look at the code, Lana,” Harriet says.

“Look, we don’t want to hurt John,” Lana says.

She doesn’t want to hurt John. The effrontery of it, of this woman thinking that it is in her power to make Harriet do anything for her, thinking that it is in her power to hurt John, thinking that anything about her is surprising, or clever, or even _interesting_. The human being with the power to bend Harriet to its will has not yet been born, and it certainly hasn’t taken form in Lana Pierce.

“Ms. Pierce,” Harriet says, knowing she has their complete attention. “If, within the next four minutes, John Reese is standing in front of me, unharmed, I _may_ refrain from crushing you, your little social media platform, and your “fortune.” As for you,” she says, turning to James Stern, “You will be out of my sight, and if I ever see you again, I will restore all your government files, and personally hand over the original copies, with their official seals, to the head of the CIA.”

What happens next is confusing. Stern jumps out of his seat. “Who the hell do you think you are!” He shouts, but he hesitates - like he’s torn between staying in the room and running for the hills.

Harriet stands, and then Lana comes between them, shoving Harriet back against the chair. Harriet loses her balance, falling sideways, but she somehow falls on top of Lana. Then they’re on the floor, struggling, and Lana pushes her down. She pushes her down, and _she pulls out a gun._

A shot rings out. Harriet realizes that the gun is on her, that it’s been fired into her vest. She can’t breathe, and for some reason Lana is leaning down on top of her. Lana’s mouth is over her ear, and she is whispering, “ _Stay down_.”

*

When John comes to, he’s lying on the floor, his hand on a door frame. The air around him is cold, the walls are white, and the lighting is so bright that he can’t bear to open his eyes all the way. There is a ventilation shaft just above his head, and it makes a soft whooshing sound, but there’s no other noise.

He rolls over, and the movement sets off a headache. But his limbs are intact, and when he looks around, he finds that he’s still in the same room. He hasn’t moved since… He tries to check the time, but his watch is gone.

Standing, he tries the door. There’s no doorknob and the hinges are on the other side. Of course. He crouches down - oh, his head - to look at the ventilation shaft. It’s about a foot wide. Useless.

*

Harriet stays down. She breathes in and out slowly, playing dead, and listens to the commotion outside Lana’s office. She stays down, but she has no idea why. At first it’s so surprising that she stays down just to see what will happen. But nothing happens. It’s a strange sensation. Harriet is accustomed to being far away from the action, but she’s normally watching it on a monitor, and knows exactly what is going on. But here, on this dusty office floor, she only has her imagination, and the tiny shards of information she’s been given.

Harriet starts thinking. Had Lana has really just pretended to kill her? That opens up the possibility that she is a double agent of some kind. But a double agent for whom? Is Elias involved? Their friends at the NYPD? Should she alert the NYPD somehow? Perhaps The Machine will do it for her. 

When the noise outside the office has completely died down, she checks the time - as unobtrusively as she can, still playing dead - and finds that she’d been there for an hour. No one’s been in the office. Do they even know she’s here? What is Lana doing? Thinking back to the first time she met Lana, Harriet cannot recall anything which could explain the current state of affairs. Lana Pierce was just a perceptive woman with a McLaren and just enough curiosity to be dangerous. Harriet never imagined that she had any hidden motives.

Well, Harriet thinks, if this is a conspiracy within the action-adventure story of her life, the final showdown doesn’t seem to be happening in this building. When she hasn’t heard the slightest sound from outside of Lana’s office for another hour, Harriet picks herself off the floor - the pain blinds her for a moment - and takes stock. Her painkillers wore off some time ago, and she can barely turn her head, but her ribs are fine. They’re just fine. Lana shot straight into Harriet’s vest, but she must have shot blanks.

It’s around 4 o’clock when she heads back. There’s nothing else for her to do. No earpiece, no tracker… All she can do is hope that John will do the same. When she gets there, the place is empty, save for Bear, who is visibly confused. “Yes, Bear, I know I said I was going to get John. I -”

Bear’s sad puppy dog face does Harriet in. She doesn’t know where John is, she doesn’t even know if he’s alive, but she can’t say the words out loud to Bear, or she’ll… She digs out her painkillers mechanically, and she sits down at the desk, Bear flopping his head onto her lap. So she’d failed at field work. She’s good at other things, she tells herself. Taking a deep breath, Harriet pulls up all the security footage she can find.

*

It is said that the great warriors of legend will live through epic battles and death-defying experiences, barely surviving danger, misery and pain, only to emerge more powerful, forbearing, and brave. Hardly even mortal, these great soldiers rise above us common people. Their lives are transcendent.

But not all the time. A warrior’s life is not all thrilling heroics all the time. Sometimes, a warrior experiences moments of spectacular anti-climax.

John is in the middle of inspecting a floor joint when there’s a knock on the door, and a voice calls out, “I’m going to open the door. Don’t shoot me.”

It’s Lana. She opens the door, and she’s alone on the other side. Her shirt is ripped. “I'm a CIA asset. It's all over. Harriet is fine,” She says. 

John gapes. There aren’t any words for... And where is Stern? Where is Harriet? Fuck. He’s been out long enough for Harriet to…

He clears his throat. “What happened?”

“Let’s get some food. I’ll explain everything.”

“No. Where is Harriet?”

Lana’s sighs. “Ok, the thing is, I don’t know exactly where she is.”

John starts to sprint towards the exit.

“Wait, John,” Lana throws herself between him and the door. “Please just -“

“I _will_ hurt you, Lana.”

“John, _wait_ ,” she says, raising her voice. “I’ve been keeping the two of you out of this so far, but now I’ve only got about an hour to tell you what just happened, because after that some federal agents are going to come knocking around and I _know_ you don’t want to be anywhere near me when that happens.”

John considers this, and then he holds out his hand. “I need your phone.”

“What?”

“I need your phone,” he repeats. “And a minute alone.”

Lana wordlessly digs her phone out of her pocket, hands it to John, and leaves the room. 

Without dialling, John holds the phone up to his ear, and asks “is she okay?”

On the other end of the line, there is a crackling sound of static, and then a voice says, “yes.”

John is dumbstruck. Is that it, he wonders? Is it all over? He’s still full of adrenaline, waiting for bad news and violence.

But Lana takes him to a diner down the street. When they’re settled in, with turkey sandwiches and giant glasses of water, Lana starts talking. She sounds different, like she’s talking about something boring. Like traffic congestion, or income tax.

“So one day, this guy comes up to me, and he says, ‘have you ever heard of a man called James Stern?’ He tells me a bunch of other names - James Black, James Grenier, James Fairfax - and says this is someone I might have heard of, because he sells his services to people like me.”

Lana pauses to eat half her sandwich in two bites. “I’d never heard of him, and I told the guy. But the next day, he shows up again and tells me he’s a CIA agent.”

John nods. The food is a relief; his headache is receding. Whatever Stern gave him to knock him out must have been really short-acting, because he’s feeling almost normal.

“They didn’t tell me much,” Lana says. “They just wanted any information I could get on James Stern, and they wanted to know - like they wanted to know if he was the top of the food chain.”

"And?"

“And they wanted me to hire him.

"And?"

Lana drains her glass. “Look, John, I’m sure you’re already wondering what I’m going to do to take advantage of you next. But I just want to tell you the whole story. It won’t take long.”

John nods. Fine, he thinks. He can’t wait to get out of here, but can stay long enough to get some answers.

*

When Harriet finds security footage of John and Lana, she can only see them, she can’t hear them. She can see them chatting, ordering their meals, but it takes some time for her to get audio. In fact, it takes so long, that by the time Harriet has managed to remotely access the diner’s surveillance cameras, they’ve practically finished eating.

“So you hired Stern to spy on us. How did you know there was a computer program?” John is saying.

Suddenly, Lana looks smug. “I didn’t. I… I spent a couple of nights trying to figure out how you knew I was in trouble, and that was my best guess.”

Harriet blinks. _What?_

“The CIA okayed an industrial espionage scenario,” Lana says, “and next thing I knew, it was all set. I told Stern that you saved people, and I wanted to know if you’d developed some kind of data aggregation software to know who was in danger. I didn’t know he’d worked for Harriet, by the way. Found out at the same time as you.” Lana pauses to signal the waitress for more water. “Talk about a dramatic reveal.”

“One hell of a body count, for industrial espionage,” John says

Lana ignored the comment. “At first, he spent a really long time just observing you guys. Like, months. I never met him; he just texted me a few words every week. Then, three months ago, he texts, ‘starting trial-and-error phase’. He… did things. To see what got you guys to show up and what didn’t.”

John looks away

“And you were right. I wouldn’t like being a spy,” she says. “Because after that, I asked him if there was another way. He said he would try framing people, instead.”

That explains a lot, Harriet thinks.

“That explains a lot,” John says.

“I finally got Stern to meet me in person when the two of you showed up at my door. Neither one of us could figure out how you’d told Harriet where you were, so Stern came in to look the place over after you left. By then, Stern had pretty much conclusively determined what set off your software and what didn’t, but he couldn’t tell me a thing about how it worked, never mind getting his hands on the code. Which suited me just fine, because I’d finally gotten him to trust me, sort of, but I wasn’t any closer to finding out who he worked for.”

Lana interrupts her monologue to drink an entire glass of water. “I think he was getting pretty frustrated. Actually - I'm pretty sure he would've preferred to keep on avoiding Harriet forever. You should've seen his face when she threatened him, he looked like he was going to shit himself.”

John cuts her off. “When she - what?”

“Harriet showed up about three minutes after Stern knocked you out today. I guess she thought it was time to bring out the big guns.”

“Is that why he knocked me out? He was trying to get Harriet to show up?”

"That's exactly why he knocked you out. Then he took your tracker, and -" Lana suddenly stops. “I have it here," she says, and starts rooting through the pockets of her torn clothing. Moments later, she's handing John his wristwatch.

John is looking down at it, bemused. He'd always suspected that Harriet had planted a tracker on his wristwatch, but he'd never checked. Only fitting, he thinks, considering the tracker he'd long ago planted on her eyeglasses. He puts it on, and the weight of it is a relief.

"Anyway," Lana continues,"Harriet showed up, and I pretended to kill her."

John stops breathing. "What?"

"She's fine! She's fine, I checked that she was wearing a vest first, and I used blanks anyway.

“That’s..."

"I got the idea from 'The Hunger Games.' Stern was pretty freaked out already by then, because she'd threatened to restore all his government files and report him to someone. She must've really hit a nerve, because he was _not_ thinking straight after that. By the time I took him to my panic room, he was covered with cold sweat and babbling, and he ripped this,” she says, putting her hand up to where her collar was ripped open all the way to her shoulder.

Part of John wants to be delighted at the thought of Stern panicking like a rookie. But then he thinks, Stern didn’t, really. He was _legitimately_ intimidated. By _Harriet_. And John thinks, for the second time this week, "I'm so in love with her."

"He was rambling about how Harriet could've set a death switch on his files, blah blah blah. So then I said, well, maybe if he could tell me who his bosses were, and who he really needed to avoid finding out about his identity, then I could help - I mean, I’m not her, but I can get shit done. And like I said, he can't have been thinking straight, because my question didn't make any sense, I mean, why would I need to know the identity of his bosses? But he was so freaked out that he told me. I’m pretty sure the assignment was over by then either way," she says, "but I figured I’d give it a shot. I just thought… why not ask outright?”

“And where is he now?”

“In custody.”

*

She had certainly been very clever, Harriet thinks. The possibility of Lana being a CIA asset had never crossed Harriet’s mind.

Suddenly exhausted, Harriet considers leaving the station. Looking around, at the dingy, murky subway platform, it seems like the only reasonable thing to do. She could leave a note for John, she thinks, and find a nice hotel where they would let Bear stay with her.

“Want to find a nice place to sleep, Bear?”

But when Harriet turns back towards the monitor, John is saying, “so let me get this straight. You’re… James Bond.”

Lana rolls her eyes. “Pffff I have way better comebacks.”

“Wait, wait, no, I just realized something else,” John says. “Does this mean - am I a _Bond girl_ in this scenario?”

Lana smiles broadly. “You are _really pretty_ John.”

And Harriet simultaneously can’t look away, and feels a headache forming, just above her left temple. This must be what hell is like.

“I’m sorry I…” John suddenly says, his shoulders hunched.

Lana raises an eyebrow. “ _You’re_ sorry? For what?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t…” he waves his arm vaguely. “It wasn’t… You know.”

Lana sits back, and sets her glass down. “Are you apologizing to me because _I_ slept with you under false pretences?”

John shakes his head.

“I’m not the one you should apologize to, John.”

John puts his hand up, seemingly to check for his earpiece, and looks up, scanning for cameras. When he looks back at Lana, he seems dejected, and all of a sudden, Harriet finds herself holding her breath.

“Have you always been bad at this stuff?” Lana asks. The personal question seems incongruous. But, Harriet reminds herself, Lana _is_ currently heading a popular dating website. And she and John did... They have been intimate. Some might see that as a license to pry, Harriet supposes

John looks stricken. “...A disaster.”

“Oh, _John_.”

“I've never, you know, in the past, when I -“ John looks completely discomfited. “They weren’t people who knew me."

Lana translates, “You mean, knew that you killed people for the government.”

John looks away. Harriet suddenly feels like crying.

“You’ve never been in love with someone who knew everything about you.”

His eyes widen, and he says, “What if she doesn’t -" his voice cracking on the last words. He doesn’t say the rest.

Lana says, "What if she does?"


	7. Chapter 7

John stands when Lana does. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Lana, but I hope we never see each other again.”

She smiles sadly. “Yeah.”

“I’ll exit through the kitchen,” John tells her. “You take the front.”

He leaves without looking back. It’s dusk, the sun low in the sky, blinding him in the alley behind the restaurant. He breathes in, and suddenly realizes that it’s over. It’s over, and he’s going back to Harriet.

She’s sitting in front of the monitors when he gets back, the top button of her blouse undone, her jacket on the chair. Harriet’s hair is dishevelled, there is an angry red scrape on her left ear, and one of her sleeves is torn and bloodied.

John's heart stutters. "Harriet."

“I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“Am I?”

John goes to his knees in front of her. He feels so powerless. Maybe it’s true that his feelings are reciprocated, but John and Harriet’s relationship is what it is, and there is nothing John can do, nothing he can say. He's already told her everything. But John has known for a long time that every unrequited minute with Harriet will hurt more than the one before, and he would still rather be by her side than anywhere else. He figured out long ago that love isn’t the person who looks and feels like redemption, or youth, or promise - it’s the person who feels like home. He just wants to be home.

“I heard you,” Harriet says, blinking sadly. The light from the desk lamp is making her irises look like they're a darker shade of blue, and her eyes look a little bit swollen, 

“You’re not -“

“Stern, the CIA, Lana…” Harriet doesn’t seem to know where to look. “I heard you.”

John doesn’t - “Oh.”

Harriet’s breathing is uneven. She moves like she is going to say something, but she just gazes down at him and looks distraught. John finds himself staring at the scrape on her ear.

He stands. He knows what to do. “Sit on the desk, Harriet.”

“I beg your pardon?”

John finds a first aid kit. “Sit.”

Harriet sits. John pulls off her glasses, and sets them down on the desk behind her. He takes out gauze and disinfectant. Harriet’s skin is soft and she smells like dry-cleaned clothes and library books, and a little bit like rain. John smoothes ointment over the scrapes, and tapes a butterfly bandage over her ear.

And just as he’s about to pull away, she catches his arm. She pulls him down with one hand, and cups the side of his face with the other. “Thank you, John,” she says, and gently covers his mouth with her own.

“Thank you,” she whispers again, when she pulls away. She says it, more to herself, than to him.

She is shaking. John closes his eyes, and blindly moves towards her. “Harriet,” he says. He angles his head, and tentatively moves his mouth against hers.

Harriet makes an inarticulate sound. Both her arms are around him. John runs his hands down her back, clutching at her without quite knowing what he’s doing.

“John,” she whispers, when she breaks off the kiss. “I live in a condo in the village, the most nondescript place I could find.”

Maybe this is how the world works, John thinks. You imagine something happening for years, and then when it happens, you can’t actually believe it. "Harriet, what are you -"

“I get my hair cut at the Waldorf.”

“What?"

And the words start pouring out, like a stopper’s been removed. “My favourite food is coq au vin, and the truth is, I love coffee,” she tells him, pushing her hands into his hair. “My favourite novel is The Glass Bead Game.”

“There weren’t any books by Hermann Hesse at the library,” he answers dumbly.

“I know,” Harriet says and then pushes her tongue into his mouth.

Her skin is so, so soft. John groans, and he pulls Harriet closer to himself. “You don’t have to tell me anything,” he says, when she breaks off the kiss.

“I used to be the president of the MIT Arthur Conan Doyle fan club," she answers, obstinate. "My real name is Harriet Wentworth,” she adds, hugging him tighter, so close that John can feel her eyelashes flutter against his cheek. “And I love you.”

John never stayed awake at night, pining for Harriet. He never moodily daydreamed about her while listening to sentimental music. He never even noticed the moment when he started wanting to be with her all the time. So he is now _utterly_ unprepared to find out that she feels the same way.

“John Reese is my real name,” he blurts out.

“ _What_?”

“You - you really didn’t know?”

“No, I always thought... I thought the CIA had retroactively altered your file, and I looked for your real name and family for a time, but…” Harriet flushes. “But after _that_ day, I stopped looking. I thought it was unfair that I knew so much about you, when you knew nothing about me.”

“Oh.”

Harriet looks down, like she’s embarrassed.

“Harriet,” he says, threading their fingers together.

She looks up at him, eyes flashing. “I know.”

They stagger towards the bed, and Harriet lies down on her back. John lies on his side, his head on her shoulder. And then Harriet moves her hips, like she’s settling in. She just moves her lower back around a bit, but John’s body is flush up against hers, and suddenly every confused, craving, longing thought he’s ever had about Harriet comes rushing over him, and he wants her so much, it feels like he’s choking.

*

Harriet pulls at John until he’s on top of her - the entire strapping, rugged length of him - in a half-crouched position. One of his knees in between her legs, and he's putting his hands into her clothes. She wriggles down, until she can move against his knee, and she hears him make a startled sound. He's so strong, she thinks, and sturdy, and helpless. She tugs at his jacket, he takes it off, and she runs her hands over his shoulders. How have they never done this before? How did they never -

“Let me -” John says, and starts to pull off her clothes. 

Harriet tries to say, “It’s been some time since -” but she doesn’t finish, because John puts his tongue between her legs.

“Please,” she hears him say, and she stops thinking, until they both come with a stumbling tangle of lust and feeling.

They sleep for a long time after that.

*

“I think The Machine started all of this.”

“Hmmf?” John sits up, or at least tries to. He’s too tangled up in sheets to make it anywhere. He looks magnificent. He should just never be allowed to wear clothes.

“We would have become involved anyway, obviously” Harriet says, “But I think The Machine launched the script that showed that Stern had just been arrested. It was tired of us not knowing that something was going on.”

“Hey, Harriet?” John says, untangling himself and hunting through the sheets for his boxers. “You know how we’ve been really busy with fake deaths and hitmen and CIA investigations lately?”

Harriet watches him pull on his boxers. Diligently. “Hmm?”

“Well I was thinking... We're due for a change.” He sounds like he's trying to be earnest, but there's a twinkle in his eye.

“What are you suggesting, John?”

“That you let me take you out for coffee.”

FINIS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to A., who wrote the line “She had, to put it politely, been responsible for the discovery of an enviable number of networking vulnerabilities. She’d probably written the TCP/IP spec herself and given it to DARPA,” and identified the manufacturer of Logan Pierce’s car.
> 
> Thanks to J. whose book provided the line “It is said that the great warriors of legend will live through epic battles and death-defying experiences, barely surviving hunger, cold, misery and pain.”
> 
> *
> 
> The following lines were used (as they are, or as templates) at various points:
> 
> “Rodney's still the same, pushy, in-your-face guy he's always been, and John realizes with dismay that he's radically underestimated Rodney's capacity for subtlety—either that, or he's losing his mind and nothing happened between them at all.”  
> from Kid A, by Speranza
> 
> “No, I mean it. I don’t know any other way to be with people. I don’t know any other way to get what I want other than making a game of it all. But I expect you to know the rules, Gene. I’m not counting on cheating you.”  
> from Changes, by Loz
> 
> “It is possible, very possible, not to have to sex with someone.”  
> “It is difficult to tell someone to stop looking at you like making you feel safe and happy is all that is ever going to matter to them.”  
> from How We Smashed Johari's Window, by Halotolerant
> 
> “Have you always been bad at relationship stuff?”
> 
> “Downright diabolical.” Sam raised his head. He could feel tears prickling the back of his eyes. It had been over a decade since he’d cried. “I've not, you know, in the past I've not been attracted to other men." Sam flailed.
> 
> "So? You're obviously attracted to one now. You should see the way you look at each other. Sometimes it's like there's no-one else in the room."
> 
> "What if it doesn't work out?"  
> from Method In’t., by Loz
> 
> *
> 
> This fic took so long to write that half the people involved have had time to drift to different fandoms. I am indebted to my friends for their help and encouragement, particularly to my long-suffering betas, marginaliana and charloween. All my thanks.
> 
> *
> 
> And now: out of context theatre!
> 
> “Does Harriet shave her legs, or wax them?”
> 
> “Good thing it’s canonically correct to pretend that ostensibly abandoned places never need dusting”
> 
> me:  I can't believe I ever called it a "subplot"  
> enemyofperfect:  sure, it's a subplot  
> and Australia is a small island nation  
> you know

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] An Unstoppable Force](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4052572) by [dodificus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dodificus/pseuds/dodificus)




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